^ 


LlokAR'i 

UNIVERSITY  OF 
CALIFORNIA 

SAN  DIEOO 


"N 


l* 


£ 


$ '\\V 


iV 


* 


<>-b 


(^ 


APPRECIA  TIONS 


By  the  same  Author. 

THE  RENAISSANCE  :  Studies  in  Art  and  Poetry.  Fourth 
Thousand,  Revised  and  Enlarged,     ios.  6d. 

MARIUS  THE  EPICUREAN  :  His  Sensations  and  Ideas. 
2  Vols.     Second  Edition.     12s. 

IMAGINARY  PORTRAITS  :  A  Prince  of  Court  Painters  ; 
Denys  l'Auxerrois  ;  Sebastian  van  Storck  ;  Duke  Carl 
of  Rosenmold.     6s. 


MACMILLAN  AND  CO. 


^usn 


APPRECIATIONS 


WITH  AN  ESSAY  ON  STYLE 


BY 

WALTER    PATER 

FELLOW  OF  BRASENOSE  COLLEGE 


THIRD  THOUSAND 


Honlion 

MACMILLAN    AjND    CO. 

AND  NEW  YORK 
189O 

All  rights  reserved 


First  Edition  18S9 
Second  Edition  1890 


TO  THE   MEMORY  OF   MY   BROTHER 

WILLIAM    THOMPSON    PATER 

WHO   QUITTED  A    USEFUL   AND    HAPPY    LIFE 

SUNDAY   APRIL   24  1887 

REQUIEM    ETERNAM    DONA    El    DOMINE 
ET    LUX    PERPETUA    LUCEAT    El 


Digitized  by  the  Internet  Archive 

in  2007  with  funding  from 

Microsoft  Corporation 


http://www.archive.org/details/appreciationswitOOpateiala 


CONTENTS 


STYLE          

I 

WORDSWORTH     

•       37 

COLERIDGE           ...... 

.       64 

CHARLES    LAMB              ..... 

107 

SIR   THOMAS    BROWNE            .... 

127 

"  LOVE'S   LABOURS   LOST  ".  . 

.     167 

"MEASURE   FOR   MEASURE1' 

176 

SHAKESPEARE'S    ENGLISH    KINGS 

192 

DANTE   GABRIEL    ROSSETTI 

•     213 

FEUILLET'S    "  LA    MORTE  "  . 

.     228 

POSTSCRIPT 

•     253 

STYLE 

Since  all  progress  of  mind  consists  for  the  most  part 
in  differentiation,  in  the  resolution  of  an  obscure  and 
complex  object  into  its  component  aspects,  it  is  surely 
the  stupidest  of  losses  to  confuse  things  which  right 
reason  has  put  asunder,  to  lose  the  sense  of  achieved 
distinctions,  the  distinction  between  poetry  and  prose, 
for  instance,  or,  to  speak  more  exactly,  between  the 
laws  and  characteristic  excellences  of  verse  and  prose 
composition.  On  the  other  hand, those  who  have  dwelt 
most  emphatically  on  the  distinction  between  prose  and 
verse,  prose  and  poetry,  may  sometimes  have  been 
tempted  to  limit  the  proper  functions  of  prose  too 
narrowly  ;  and  this  again  is  at  least  false  economy,  as 
being,  in  effect,  the  renunciation  of  a  certain  means  or 
faculty,  in  a  world  where  after  all  we  must  needs  make 
the  most  of  things.  Critical  efforts  to  limit  art  a  priori, 
by  anticipations  regarding  the  natural  incapacity  of  the 
material  with  which  this  or  that  artist  works,  as  the 
sculptor  with  solid  form,  or  the  prose-writer  with  the 


2  APPRECIA  TIONS 

ordinary  language  of  men,  are  always  liable  to  be 
discredited  by  the  facts  of  artistic  production  ;  and 
while  prose  is  actually  found  to  be  a  coloured  thing 
with  Bacon,  picturesque  with  Livy  and  Carlyle, 
musical  with  Cicero  and  Newman,  mystical  and 
intimate  with  Plato  and  Michelet  and  Sir  Thomas 
Browne,  exalted  or  florid,  it  may  be,  with  Milton  and 
Taylor,  it  will  be  useless  to  protest  that  it  can  be 
nothing  at  all,  except  something  very  tamely,  and 
narrowly  confined  to  mainly  practical  ends — a  kind 
of  "  good  round-hand  ;"  as  useless  as  the  protest  that 
poetry  might  not  touch  prosaic  subjects  as  with 
Wordsworth,  or  an  abstruse  matter  as  with  Browning, 
or  treat  contemporary  life  nobly  as  with  Tennyson. 
In  subordination  to  one  essential  beauty  in  all  good 
literary  style,  in  all  literature  as  a  fine  art,  as  there 
are  many  beauties  of  poetry  so  the  beauties  of  prose 
are  many,  and  it  is  the  business  of  criticism  to 
estimate  them  as  such  ;  as  it  is  good  in  the  criticism 
of  verse  to  look  for  those  hard,  logical,  and  quasi- 
prosaic  excellences  which  that  too  has,  or  needs.  To 
find  in  the  poem,  amid  the  flowers,  the  allusions,  the 
mixed  perspectives,  of  Lycidas  for  instance,  the 
thought,  the  logical  structure  : — how  wholesome !  how 
delightful !  as  to  identify  in  prose  what  we  call  the 
poetry,  the  imaginative  power,  not  treating  it  as  out 
of  place  and  a  kind  of  vagrant  intruder,  but  by  way  of 


STYLE  3 

an    estimate    of  its   rights,  that   is,   of  its   achieved 
powers,  there. 

Dryden,  with  the  characteristic  instinct  of  his  age, 
loved  to  emphasise  the  distinction  between  poetry 
and  prose,  the  protest  against  their  confusion  with 
each  other,  coming  with  somewhat  diminished  effect 
from  one  whose  poetry  was  so  prosaic.  In  truth,  his 
sense  of  prosaic  excellence  affected  his  verse  rather 
than  his  prose,  which  is  not  only  fervid,  richly  figured, 
poetic,  as  we  say,  but  vitiated,  all  unconsciously,  by 
many  a  scanning  line.  Setting  up  correctness,  that 
humble  merit  of  prose,  as  the  central  literary  excel- 
lence, he  is  really  a  less  correct  writer  than  he  may 
seem,  still  with  an  imperfect  mastery  of  the  relative 
pronoun.  It  might  have  been  foreseen  that,  in  the 
rotations  of  mind,  the  province  of  poetry  in  prose 
would  find  its  assertor  ;  and,  a  century  after  Dryden, 
amid  very  different  intellectual  needs,  and  with  the 
need  therefore  of  great  modifications  in  literary  form, 
the  range  of  the  poetic  force  in  literature  was  effect- 
ively enlarged  by  Wordsworth.  The  true  distinction 
between  prose  and  poetry  he  regarded  as  the  almost 
technical  or  accidental  one  of  the  absence  or  presence 
of  metrical  beauty,  or,  say !  metrical  restraint ;  and  for 
him  the  opposition  came  to  be  between  verse  and 
prose  of  course  ;  but,  as  the  essential  dichotomy  in 
this  matter,  between  imaginative  and  unimaginative 


4  APPRECIATIONS 

writing,  parallel  to  De  Quincey's  distinction  between 
"  the  literature  of  power  and  the  literature  of  know- 
ledge," in  the  former  of  which  the  composer  gives  us 
not  fact,  but  his  peculiar  sense  of  fact,  whether  past 
or  present. 

Dismissing  then,  under  sanction  of  Wordsworth, 
that  harsher  opposition  of  poetry  to  prose,  as  savouring 
in  fact  of  the  arbitrary  psychology  of  the  last  century, 
and  with  it  the  prejudice  that  there  can  be  but  one 
only  beauty  of  prose  style,  I  propose  here  to  point 
out  certain  qualities  of  all  literature  as  a  fine  -art, 
which,  if  they  apply  to  the  literature  of  fact,  apply 
still  more  to  the  literature  of  the  imaginative  sense  of 
fact,  while  they  apply  indifferently  to  verse  and  prose, 
so  far  as  either  is  really  imaginative — certain  condi- 
tions of  true  art  in  both  alike,  which  conditions  may 
also  contain  in  them  the  secret  of  the  proper  dis- 
crimination and  guardianship  of  the  peculiar  excel- 
lences of  either. 

The  line  between  fact  and  something  quite 
different  from  external  fact  is,  indeed,  hard  to  draw. 
In  Pascal,  for  instance,  in  the  persuasive  writers 
generally,  how  difficult  to  define  the  point  where, 
from  time  to  time,  argument  which,  if  it  is  to  be 
worth  anything  at  all,  must  consist  of  facts  or  groups 
of  facts,  becomes  a  pleading — a  theorem  no  longer, 
but  essentially  an  appeal  to  the  reader  to  catch  the 


STYLE  5 

writer's  spirit,  to  think  with  him,  if  one  can  or  will — 
an  expression  no  longer  of  fact  but  of  his  sense  of 
it,  his  peculiar  intuition  of  a  world,  prospective,  or 
discerned  below  the  faulty  conditions  of  the  present,  in 
either  case  changed  somewhat  from  the  actual  world. 
In  science,  on  the  other  hand,  in  history  so  far  as  it 
conforms  to  scientific  rule,  we  have  a  literary  domain 
where  the  imagination  may  be  thought  to  be  always 
an  intruder.      And  as,  in  all  science,  the  functions  of 
literature  reduce  themselves  eventually  to  the  tran- 
scribing of  fact,  so  all  the  excellences  of  literary  form 
in  regard  to  science  are  reducible  to  various  kinds  of 
painstaking  ;  this  good  quality  being  involved  in  all 
"skilled  work"  whatever,  in  the  drafting  of  an  act  of 
parliament,  as  in  sewing.     Yet  here  again,  the  writer's 
sense  of  fact,  in  history  especially,  and  in  all  those 
complex  subjects  which  do  but  lie  on  the  borders  of 
science,  will  still  take  the  place  of  fact,  in  various 
degrees.     Your  historian,  for  instance,  with  absolutely 
truthful  intention,  amid  the  multitude  of  facts  presented 
to  him  must  needs  select,  and  in  selecting  assert  some- 
thing of  his  own  humour,  something  that  comes  not 
of  the  world  without  but  of  a  vision  within.      So 
Gibbon  moulds  his  unwieldy  material  to  a  precon- 
ceived view.      Livy,  Tacitus,  Michelet,  moving  full  of 
poignant  sensibility  amid    the   records  of  the  past, 
each,  after  his  own  sense,  modifies — who  can  tell  where 

B 


h 


6  APPRECIATIONS 

and  to  what  degree  ? — and  becomes  something  else 
than  a  transcriber  ;  each,  as  he  thus  modifies,  passing 
into  the  domain  of  art  proper.  For  just  in  proportion 
as  the  writer's  aim,  consciously  or  unconsciously,  comes 
to  be  the  transcribing,  not  of  the  world,  not  of  mere  fact, 
but  of  his  sense  of  it,  he  becomes  an  artist,  his  work 
fine  art  ;  and  good  art  (as  I  hope  ultimately  to  show) 
in  proportion  to  the  truth  of  his  presentment  of  that 
sense  ;  as  in  those  humbler  or  plainer  functions  of 
literature  also,  truth — truth  to  bare  fact,  there — is 
the  essence  of  such  artistic  quality  as  they  may 
have.  Truth  !  there  can  be  no  merit,  no  craft  at 
all,  without  that.  And  further,  all  beauty  is  in  the 
long  run  only  fineness  of  truth,  or  what  we  call 
expression,  the  finer  accommodation  of  speech  to 
that  vision  within. 

— The  transcript  of  his  sense  of  fact  rather  than  the 
fact,  as  being  preferable,  pleasanter,  more  beautiful  to 
the  writer  himself.  In  literature,  as  in  every  other 
product  of  human  skill,  in  the  moulding  of  a  bell  or 
a  platter  for  instance,  wherever  this  sense  asserts  itself, 
wherever  the  producer  so  modifies  his  work  as,  over 
and  above  its  primary  use  or  intention,  to  make  it 
pleasing  (to  himself,  of  course,  in  the  first  instance) 
there,  "  fine "  as  opposed  to  merely  serviceable  art, 
exists.  Literary  art,  that  is,  like  all  art  which  is  in 
any  way  imitative  or  reproductive  of  fact — form,  or 


STYLE  7 

colour,  or  incident — is  the  representation  of  such  fact 
as  connected  with  soul,  of  a  specific  personality,  in 
its  preferences,  its  volition  and  power. 

Such  is  the  matter  of  imaginative  or  artistic 
literature — this  transcript,  not  of  mere  fact,  but  of 
fact  in  its  infinite  variety,  as  modified  by  human 
preference  in  all  its  infinitely  varied  forms.  It  will 
be  good  literary  art  not  because  it  is  brilliant  or 
sober,  or  rich,  or  impulsive,  or  severe,  but  just  in 
proportion  as  its  representation  of  that  sense,  that 
soul-fact,  is  true,  verse  being  only  one  department  of 
such  literature,  and  imaginative  prose,  it  may  be 
thought,  being  the  special  art  of  the  modern  world. 
That  imaginative  prose  should  be  the  special  and 
opportune  art  of  the  modern  world  results  from  two 
important  facts  about  the  latter :  first,  the  chaotic 
variety  and  complexity  of  its  interests,  making  the 
intellectual  issue,  the  really  master  currents  of  the 
present  time  incalculable — a  condition  of  mind  little 
susceptible  of  the  restraint  proper  to  verse  form,  so 
that  the  most  characteristic  verse  of  the  nineteenth 
century  has  been  lawless  verse  ;  and  secondly,  an 
all-pervading  naturalism,  a  curiosity  about  everything 
whatever  as  it  really  is,  involving  a  certain  humility 
of  attitude,  cognate  to  what  must,  after  all,  be  the 
less  ambitious  form  of  literature.  And  prose  thus 
asserting  itself  as  the  special  and  privileged  artistic 


8  APPRECIA  TIONS 

faculty  of  the  present  day,  will  be,  however  critics 
may  try  to  narrow  its  scope,  as  varied  in  its  excellence 
as  humanity  itself  reflecting  on  the  facts  of  its  latest 
experience — an  instrument  of  many  stops,  meditative, 
observant,  descriptive,  eloquent,  analytic,  plaintive, 
fervid.  Its  beauties  will  be  not  exclusively  "  pedes- 
trian " :  it  will  exert,  in  due  measure,  all  the  varied 
charms  of  poetry,  down  to  the  rhythm  which,  as  in 
Cicero,  or  Michelet,  or  Newman,  at  their  best,  gives 
its  musical  value  to  every  syllable.* 

The  literary  artist  is  of  necessity  a  scholar,  and  in 
what  he  proposes  to  do  will  have  in  mind,  first  of  all, 
the  scholar  and  the  scholarly  conscience — the  male 
conscience  in  this  matter,  as  we  must  think  it,  under 
a  system  of  education  which  still  to  so  large  an 
extent  limits  real  scholarship  to  men.  In  his  self- 
criticism,  he  supposes  always  that  sort  of  reader  who 
will  go  (full  of  eyes)  warily,  considerately,  though 
without  consideration  for  him,  over  the  ground  which 
the  female  conscience  traverses  so  lightly,  so  amiably. 

*  Mr.  Saintsbury,  in  his  Specimens  of  English  Prose,  from  Malory 
to  Macaulay,  has  succeeded  in  tracing,  through  successive  English 
prose-writers,  the  tradition  of  that  severer  beauty  in  them,  of  which 
this  admirable  scholar  of  our  literature  is  known  to  be  a  lover.  English 
Prose,  from  Mandeville  to  Thackeray,  more  recently  "chosen  and 
edited "  by  a  younger  scholar,  Mr.  Arthur  Galton,  of  New  College, 
Oxford,  a  lover  of  our  literature  at  once  enthusiastic  and  discreet,  aims 
at  a  more  various  illustration  of  the  eloquent  powers  of  English  prose, 
and  is  a  delightful  companion. 


STYLE  9 

For  the  material  in  which  he  works  is  no  more  a 
creation  of  his  own  than  the  sculptor's  marble. 
Product  of  a  myriad  various  minds  and  contending 
tongues,  compact  of  obscure  and  minute  association, 
a  language  has  its  own  abundant  and  often  recondite 
laws,  in  the  habitual  and  summary  recognition  of 
which  scholarship  consists.  A  writer,  full  of  a  matter 
he  is  before  all  things  anxious  to  express,  may  think 
of  those  laws,  the  limitations  of  vocabulary,  structure, 
and  the  like,  as  a  restriction,  but  if  a  real  artist  will 
find  in  them  an  opportunity.  His  punctilious 
observance  of  the  proprieties  of  his  medium  will 
diffuse  through  all  he  writes  a  general  air  of  sensi- 
bility, of  refined  usage.  Exclusiones  debited  natures — 
the  exclusions,  or  rejections,  which  nature  demands — 
we  know  how  large  a  part  these  play,  according  to 
Bacon,  in  the  science  of  nature.  In  a  somewhat 
changed  sense,  we  might  say  that  the  art  of  the 
scholar  is  summed  up  in  the  observance  of  those 
rejections  demanded  by  the  nature  of  his  medium, 
the  material  he  must  use.  Alive  to  the  value  of  an 
atmosphere  in  which  every  term  finds  its  utmost 
degree  of  expression,  and  with  all  the  jealousy  of  a 
lover  of  words,  he  will  resist  a  constant  tendency  on 
the  part  of  the  majority  of  those  who  use  them  to 
efface  the  distinctions  of  language,  the  facility  of 
writers  often  reinforcing  in  this  respect  the  work  of 


io  APPRECIATIONS 

the  vulgar.  He  will  feel  the  obligation  not  of  the 
laws  only,  but  of  those  affinities,  avoidances,  those 
mere  preferences,  of  his  language,  which  through  the 
associations  of  literary  history  have  become  a  part  of 
its  nature,  prescribing  the  rejection  of  many  a  neology, 
many  a  license,  many  a  gipsy  phrase  which  might 
present  itself  as  actually  expressive.  His  appeal, 
again,  is  to  the  scholar,  who  has  great  experience  in 
literature,  and  will  show  no  favour  to  short-cuts,  or 
hackneyed  illustration,  or  an  affectation  of  learning 
designed  for  the  unlearned.  Hence  a  contention,  a 
sense  of  self-restraint  and  renunciation,  having  for 
the  susceptible  reader  the  effect  of  a  challenge  for 
minute  consideration  ;  the  attention  of  the  writer,  in 
every  minutest  detail,  being  a  pledge  that  it  is  worth 
the  reader's  while  to  be  attentive  too,  that  the  writer 
is  dealing  scrupulously  with  his  instrument,  and 
therefore,  indirectly,  with  the  reader  himself  also,  that 
he  has  the  science  of  the  instrument  he  plays  on,  per- 
haps, after  all,  with  a  freedom  which  in  such  case 
will  be  the  freedom  of  a  master. 

For  meanwhile,  braced  only  by  those  restraints, 
he  is  really  vindicating  his  liberty  in  the  making  of 
a  vocabulary,  an  entire  system  of  composition,  for 
himself,  his  own  true  manner  ;  and  when  we  speak 
of  the  manner  of  a  true  master  we  mean  what  is 
essential    in    his    art.       Pedantry    being    only    the 


STYLE  1 1 

scholarship  of  le  cuistre  (we  have  no  English  equiva- 
lent) he  is  no  pedant,  and  does  but  show  his  intelli- 
gence of  the  rules  of  language  in  his  freedoms  with 
it,  addition  or  expansion,  which  like  the  spontaneities 
of  manner  in  a  well-bred  person  will  still  further 
illustrate  good  taste. — The  right  vocabulary  !  Trans- 
lators have  not  invariably  seen  how  all-important  that 
is  in  the  work  of  translation,  driving  for  the  most 
part  at  idiom  or  construction  ;  whereas,  if  the  original 
be  first-rate,  one's  first  care  should  be  with  its 
elementary  particles,  Plato,  for  instance,  being  often 
reproducible  by  an  exact  following,  with  no  variation 
in  structure,  of  word  after  word,  as  the  pencil  follows 
a  drawing  under  tracing-paper,  so  only  each  word  or 
syllable  be  not  of  false  colour,  to  change  my  illustra- 
tion a  little. 

Well !  that  is  because  any  writer  worth  translating 
at  all  has  winnowed  and  searched  through  his  vocab- 
ulary, is  conscious  of  the  words  he  would  select  in 
systematic  reading  of  a  dictionary,  and  still  more  of 
the  words  he  would  reject  were  the  dictionary  other 
than  Johnson's  ;  and  doing  this  with  his  peculiar  sense 
of  the  world  ever  in  view,  in  search  of  an  instrument  for 
the  adequate  expression  of  that,  he  begets  a  vocabulary 
faithful  to  the  colouring  of  his  own  spirit,  and  in  the 
strictest  sense  original.  That  living  authority  which 
language   needs  lies,  in   truth,  in   its  scholars,  who 


1 2  APP  RECTA  TIONS 

recognising  always  that  every  language  possesses  a 
genius,  a  very  fastidious  genius,  of  its  own,  expand 
at  once  and  purify  its  very  elements,  which  must 
needs  change  along  with  the  changing  thoughts  of 
living  people.  Ninety  years  ago,  for  instance,  great 
mental  force,  certainly,  was  needed  by  Wordsworth, 
to  break  through  the  consecrated  poetic  associations 
of  a  century,  and  speak  the  language  that  was  his, 
that  was  to  become  in  a  measure  the  language  of  the 
next  generation.  But  he  did  it  with  the  tact  of  a 
scholar  also.  English,  for  a  quarter  of  a  century 
past,  has  been  assimilating  the  phraseology  of 
pictorial  art ;  for  half  a  century,  the  phraseology  of 
the  great  German  metaphysical  movement  of  eighty 
years  ago  ;  in  part  also  the  language  of  mystical 
theology  :  and  none  but  pedants  will  regret  a  great 
consequent  increase  of  its  resources.  For  many  years 
to  come  its  enterprise  may  well  lie  in  the  naturalisa- 
tion of  the  vocabulary  of  science,  so  only  it  be  under 
the  eye  of  a  sensitive  scholarship — in  a  liberal 
naturalisation  of  the  ideas  of  science  too,  for  after  all 
the  chief  stimulus  of  good  style  is  to  possess  a  full, 
rich,  complex  matter  to  grapple  with.  The  literary 
artist,  therefore,  will  be  well  aware  of  physical  science  ; 
science  also  attaining,  in  its  turn,  its  true  literary 
ideal.  And  then,  as  the  scholar  is  nothing  without 
the  historic  sense,  he  will  be  apt  to  restore  not  really 


STYLE  13 

obsolete  or  really  worn-out  words,  but  the  finer  edge 
of  words  still  in  use  :  ascertain,  communicate,  discover 
— words  like  these  it  has  been  part  of  our  "  business  " 
to  misuse.  And  still,  as  language  was  made  for 
man,  he  will  be  no  authority  for  correctnesses  which, 
limiting  freedom  of  utterance,  were  yet  but  accidents 
in  their  origin  ;  as  if  one  vowed  not  to  say  "  its," 
which  ought  to  have  been  in  Shakespeare  ;  "  his " 
and  "  hers,"  for  inanimate  objects,  being  but  a  barbar- 
ous and  really  inexpressive  survival.  Yet  we  have 
known  many  things  like  this.  Racy  Saxon  mono- 
syllables, close  to  us  as  touch  and  sight,  he  will 
intermix  readily  with  those  long,  savoursome,  Latin 
words,  rich  in  "  second  intention."  In  this  late  day 
certainly,  no  critical  process  can,  be  conducted 
reasonably  without  eclecticism.  Of  such  eclecticism 
we  have  a  justifying  example  in  one  of  the  first  poets 
of  our  time.  How  illustrative  of  monosyllabic  effect, 
of  sonorous  Latin,  of  the  phraseology  of  science,  of 
metaphysic,  of  colloquialism  even,  are  the  writings  of 
Tennyson  ;  yet  with  what  a  fine,  fastidious  scholarship 
throughout ! 

A  scholar  writing  for  the  scholarly,  he  will  of 
course  leave  something  to  the  willing  intelligence  of 
his  reader.  "  To  go  preach  to  the  first  passer-by," 
says  Montaigne,  "  to  become  tutor  to  the  ignorance 
of  the  first  I  meet,  is  a  thing  I  abhor  ; "  a  thing,  in 


14  APPRECIATIONS 

fact,  naturally  distressing  to  the  scholar,  who  will 
therefore  ever  be  shy  of  offering  uncomplimentary 
assistance  to  the  reader's  wit.  To  really  strenuous 
minds  there  is  a  pleasurable  stimulus  in  the  challenge 
for  a  continuous  effort  on  their  part,  to  be  rewarded 
by  securer  and  more  intimate  grasp  of  the  author's 
sense.  Self-restraint,  a  skilful  economy  of  means, 
ascesis,  that  too  has  a  beauty  of  its  own ;  and  for 
the  reader  supposed  there  will  be  an  aesthetic  satis- 
faction in  that  frugal  closeness  of  style  which  makes 
the  most  of  a  word,  in  the  exaction  from  every 
sentence  of  a  precise  relief,  in  the  just  spacing  out  of 
word  to  thought,  in  the  logically  filled  space  con- 
nected always  with  the  delightful  sense  of  difficulty 
overcome. 

Different  classes  of  persons,  at  different  times, 
make,  of  course,  very  various  demands  upon  literature. 
Still,  scholars,  I  suppose,  and  not  only  scholars,  but 
all  disinterested  lovers  of  books,  will  always  look  to 
it,  as  to  all  other  fine  art,  for  a  refuge,  a  sort  of 
cloistral  refuge,  from  a  certain  vulgarity  in  the  actual 
world.  A  perfect  poem  like  Lycidas,  a  perfect  fiction 
like  Esmond,  the  perfect  handling  of  a  theory 
like  Newman's  Idea  of  a  University,  has  for  them 
something  of  the  uses  of  a  religious  "  retreat."  Here, 
then,  with  a  view  to  the  central  need  of  a  select  few, 
those  "  men  of  a  finer  thread  "  who  have  formed  and 


STYLE  15 

maintain  the  literary  ideal,  everything,  every  com- 
ponent element,  will  have  undergone  exact  trial,  and, 
above  all,  there  will  be  no  uncharacteristic  or  tar- 
nished or  vulgar  decoration,  permissible  ornament 
being  for  the  most  part  structural,  or  necessary.  As 
the  painter  in  his  picture,  so  the  artist  in  his  book, 
aims  at  the  production  by  honourable  artifice  of  a  pe- 
culiar atmosphere.  "  The  artist,"  says  Schiller,  "  may 
be  known  rather  by  what  he  omits  "  ;  and  in  litera- 
ture, too,  the  true  artist  may  be  best  recognised  by 
his  tact  of  omission.  For  to  the  grave  reader  words 
too  are  grave  ;  and  the  ornamental  word,  the  figure, 
the  accessory  form  or  colour  or  reference,  is  rarely 
content  to  die  to  thought  precisely  at  the  right 
moment,  but  will  inevitably  linger  awhile,  stirring  a 
long  "  brain-wave  "  behind  it  of  perhaps  quite  alien 
associations. 

Just  there,  it  may  be,  is  the  detrimental  tendency  of 
the  sort  of  scholarly  attentiveness  of  mind  I  am  recom- 
mending. But  the  true  artist  allows  for  it.  He  will 
remember  that,  as  the  very  word  ornament  indicates 
what  is  in  itself  non-essential,  so  the  "  one  beauty  " 
of  all  literary  style  is  of  its  very  essence,  and  inde- 
pendent, in  prose  and  verse  alike,  of  all  removable 
decoration  ;  that  it  may  exist  in  its  fullest  lustre,  as  in 
Flaubert's  Madame  Bovary,  for  instance,  or  in  Stend- 
hal's Le  Rouge  et  Le  Noir,  in  a  composition   utterly 


1 6  APPRECIA  TIONS 

unadorned,  with  hardly  a  single  suggestion  of  visibly- 
beautiful  things.  Parallel,  allusion,  the  allusive  way 
generally,  the  flowers  in  the  garden  : — he  knows  the 
narcotic  force  of  these  upon  the  negligent  intelligence 
to  which  any  diversion,  literally,  is  welcome,  any 
vagrant  intruder,  because  one  can  go  wandering 
away  with  it  from  the  immediate  subject.  Jealous, 
if  he  have  a  really  quickening  motive  within,  of  all 
that  does  not  hold  directly  to  that,  of  the  facile,  the 
otiose,  he  will  never  depart  from  the  strictly  pedes- 
trian process,  unless  he  gains  a  ponderable  something 
thereby.  Even  assured  of  its  congruity,  he  will  still 
question  its  serviceableness.  Is  it  worth  while,  can 
we  afford,  to  attend  to  just  that,  to  just  that  figure 
or  literary  reference,  just  then? — Surplusage!  he 
will  dread  that,  as  the  runner  on  his  muscles.  For 
in  truth  all  art  does  but  consist  in  the  removal  of 
surplusage,  from  the  last  finish  of  the  gem-engraver 
blowing  away  the  last  particle  of  invisible  dust,  back 
to  the  earliest  divination  of  the  finished  work  to  be, 
lying  somewhere,  according  to  Michelangelo's  fancy, 
in  the  rough-hewn  block  of  stone. 

And  what  applies  to  figure  or  flower  must  be 
understood  of  all  other  accidental  or  removable 
ornaments  of  writing  whatever ;  and  not  of  specific 
ornament  only,  but  of  all  that  latent  colour 
and     imagery     which     language     as     such     carries 


STYLE  i7 

in  it.  A  lover  of  words  for  their  own  sake,  to  whom 
nothing  about  them  is  unimportant,  a  minute  and 
constant  observer  of  their  physiognomy,  he  will  be 
on  the  alert  not  only  for  obviously  mixed  metaphors 
of  course,  but  for  the  metaphor  that  is  mixed  in 
all  our  speech,  though  a  rapid  use  may  involve  no 
cognition  of  it.  Currently  recognising  the  incident, 
the  colour,  the  physical  elements  or  particles  in 
words  like  absorb,  consider,  extract,  to  take  the  first 
that  occur,  he  will  avail  himself  of  them,  as  further 
adding  to  the  resources  of  expression.  The  element- 
ary particles  of  language  will  be  realised  as  colour 
and  light  and  shade  through  his  scholarly  living  in  the 
full  sense  of  them.  Still  opposing  the  constant  degra- 
dation of  language  by  those  who  use  it  carelessly,  he 
will  not  treat  coloured  glass  as  if  it  were  clear ;  and 
while  half  the  world  is  using  figure  unconsciously, 
will  be  fully  aware  not  only  of  all  that  latent  figura- 
tive texture  in  speech,  but  of  the  vague,  lazy,  half- 
formed  personification — a  rhetoric,  depressing,  and 
worse  than  nothing,  because  it  has  no  really  rhetori- 
cal motive — which  plays  so  large  a  part  there,  and, 
as  in  the  case  of  more  ostentatious  ornament,  scrupu- 
lously exact  of  it,  from  syllable  to  syllable,  its  pre- 
cise value. 

So  far  I  have  been  speaking  of  certain  conditions 
of  the   literary   art   arising   out   of  the  medium   or 


1 8  APPRECIA  TIONS 

material  in  or  upon  which  it  works,  the  essential 
qualities  of  language  and  its  aptitudes  for  contingent 
ornamentation,  matters  which  define  scholarship  as 
science  and  good  taste  respectively.  They  are  both 
subservient  to  a  more  intimate  quality  of  good  style  : 
more  intimate,  as  coming  nearer  to  the  artist  himself. 
The  otiose,  the  facile,  surplusage :  why  are  these 
abhorrent  to  the  true  literary  artist,  except  because, 
in  literary  as  in  all  other  art,  structure  is  all-important, 
felt,  or  painfully  missed,  everywhere  ? — that  architec- 
tural conception  of  work,  which  foresees  the  end  in 
the  beginning  and  never  loses  sight  of  it,  and  in 
every  part  is  conscious  of  all  the  rest,  till  the  last 
sentence  does  but,  with  undiminished  vigour,  unfold 
and  justify  the  first — a  condition  of  literary  art, 
which,  in  contradistinction  to  another  quality  of  the 
artist  himself,  to  be  spoken  of  later,  I  shall  call  the 
necessity  of  mind  in  style. 

An  acute  philosophical  writer,  the  late  Dean 
Mansel  (a  writer  whose  works  illustrate  the  literary 
beauty  there  may  be  in  closeness,  and  with  obvious 
repression  or  economy  of  a  fine  rhetorical  gift)  wrote 
a  book,  of  fascinating  precision  in  a  very  obscure 
subject,  to  show  that  all  the  technical  laws  of  logic 
are  but  means  of  securing,  in  each  and  all  of  its  , 
apprehensions,  the  unity,  the  strict  identity  with 
itself,  of  the  apprehending  mind.     All  the  laws  of 


STYLE  19 

good  writing  aim  at  a  similar  unity  or  identity  of 
the  mind  in  all  the  processes  by  which  the  word  is 
associated  to  its  import.  The  term  is  right,  and  has 
its  essential  beauty,  when  it  becomes,  in  a  manner, 
what  it  signifies,  as  with  the  names  of  simple  sensa- 
tions. To  give  the  phrase,  the  sentence,  the  struc- 
tural member,  the  entire  composition,  song,  or  essay, 
a  similar  unity  with  its  subject  and  with  itself: — 
style  is  in  the  right  way  when  it  tends  towards  that. 
All  depends  upon  the  original  unity,  the  vital  whole- 
ness and  identity,  of  the  initiatory  apprehension  or 
view.  So  much  is  true  of  all  art,  which  therefore 
requires  always  its  logic,  its  comprehensive  reason — 
insight,  foresight,  retrospect,  in  simultaneous  action 
— true,  most  of  all,  of  the  literary  art,  as  being  of  all 
the  arts  most  closely  cognate  to  the  abstract  intelli- 
gence. Such  logical  coherency  may  be  evidenced 
not  merely  in  the  lines  of  composition  as  a  whole, 
but  in  the  choice  of  a  single  word,  while  it  by  no 
means  interferes  with,  but  may  even  prescribe,  much 
variety,  in  the  building  of  the  sentence  for  instance, 
or  in  the  manner,  argumentative,  descriptive,  discur- 
sive, of  this  or  that  part  or  member  of  the  entire  design. 
The  blithe,  crisp  sentence,  decisive  as  a  child's  expres- 
sion of  its  needs,  may  alternate  with  the  long -con- 
tending, victoriously  intricate  sentence  ;  the  sentence, 
born  with  the  integrity  of  a  single  word,  relieving  the 


20  APPRECIA  TIONS 

sort  of  sentence  in  which,  if  you  look  closely,  you  can 
see  much  contrivance,  much  adjustment,  to  bring  a 
highly  qualified  matter  into  compass  at  one  view. 
For  the  literary  architecture,  if  it  is  to  be  rich  and 
expressive,  involves  not  only  foresight  of  the  end  in 
the  beginning,  but  also  development  or  growth  of 
design,  in  the  process  of  execution,  with  many 
irregularities,  surprises,  and  afterthoughts ;  the  con- 
tingent as  well  as  the  necessary  being  subsumed 
under  the  unity  of  the  whole.  As  truly,  to  the  lack 
of  such  architectural  design,  of  a  single,  almost  visual, 
image,  vigorously  informing  an  entire,  perhaps  very 
intricate,  composition,  which  shall  be  austere,  ornate, 
argumentative,  fanciful,  yet  true  from  first  to  last  to 
that  vision  within,  may  be  attributed  those  weaknesses 
of  conscious  or  unconscious  repetition  of  word,  phrase, 
motive,  or  member  of  the  whole  matter,  indicating,  as 
Flaubert  was  aware,  an  original  structure  in  thought 
not  organically  complete.  With  such  foresight,  the 
actual  conclusion  will  most  often  get  itself  written 
out  of  hand,  before,  in  the  more  obvious  sense,  the 
work  is  finished.  With  some  strong  and  leading 
sense  of  the  world,  the  tight  hold  of  which  secures  true 
composition  and  not  mere  loose  accretion,  the  literary 
artist,  I  suppose,  goes  on  considerately,  setting  joint 
to  joint,  sustained  by  yet  restraining  the  productive 
ardour,  retracing  the  negligences  of  his  first  sketch, 


STYLE  21 

repeating  his  steps  only  that  he  may  give  the  reader 
a  sense  of  secure  and  restful  progress,  readjusting 
mere  assonances  even,  that  they  may  soothe  the 
reader,  or  at  least  not  interrupt  him  on  his  way  ; 
and  then,  somewhere  before  the  end  comes,  is  bur- 
dened, inspired,  with  his  conclusion,  and  betimes 
delivered  of  it,  leaving  off,  not  in  weariness  and 
because  he  finds  himself  at  an  end,  but  in  all  the 
freshness  of  volition.  His  work  now  structurally 
complete,  with  all  the  accumulating  effect  of  secondary 
shades  of  meaning,  he  finishes  the  whole  up  to  the 
just  proportion  of  that  ante-penultimate  conclusion, 
and  all  becomes  expressive.  The  house  he  has  built 
is  rather  a  body  he  has  informed.  And  so  it  happens, 
to  its  greater  credit,  that  the  better  interest  even  of  a 
narrative  to  be  recounted,  a  story  to  be  told,  will  often 
be  in  its  second  reading.  And  though  there  are 
instances  of  great  writers  who  have  been  no  artists, 
an  unconscious  tact  sometimes  directing  work  in  which 
we  may  detect,  very  pleasurably,  many  of  the  effects 
of  conscious  art,  yet  one  of  the  greatest  pleasures  of 
really  good  prose  literature  is  in  the  critical  tracing  out 
of  that  conscious  artistic  structure,  and  the  pervading 
sense  of  it  as  we  read.  Yet  of  poetic  literature  too  ; 
for,  in  truth,  the  kind  of  constructive  intelligence  here 
supposed  is  one  of  the  forms  of  the  imagination. 
That  is  the  special  function  of  mind,  in  style. 
C 


22  APPRECIA  TIONS 

Mind  and  soul : — hard  to  ascertain  philosophically, 
the  distinction  is  real  enough  practically,  for  they 
often  interfere,  are  sometimes  in  conflict,  with  each 
other.  Blake,  in  the  last  century,  is  an  instance  of 
preponderating  soul,  embarrassed,  at  a  loss,  in  an 
era  of  preponderating  mind.  As  a  quality  of  style, 
at  all  events,  soul  is  a  fact,  in  certain  writers — the 
way  they  have  of  absorbing  language,  of  attracting 
it  into  the  peculiar  spirit  they  are  of,  with  a  subtlety 
which  makes  the  actual  result  seem  like  some 
inexplicable  inspiration.  By  mind,  the  literary  artist 
reaches  us,  through  static  and  objective  indications 
of  design  in  his  work,  legible  to  all.  By  soul,  he 
reaches  us,  somewhat  capriciously  perhaps,  one  and 
not  another,  through  vagrant  sympathy  and  a  kind 
of  immediate  contact.  Mind  we  cannot  choose  but 
approve  where  we  recognise  it  ;  soul  may  repel  us, 
not  because  we  misunderstand  it.  The  way  in  which 
theological  interests  sometimes  avail  themselves  of 
language  is  perhaps  the  best  illustration  of  the  force 
I  mean  to  indicate  generally  in  literature,  by  the 
word  soul.  Ardent  religious  persuasion  may  exist, 
may  make  its  way,  without  finding  any  equivalent 
heat  in  language  :  or,  again,  it  may  enkindle  words  to 
various  degrees,  and  when  it  really  takes  hold  of  them 
doubles  its  force.  Religious  history  presents  many 
remarkable  instances  in  which,  through  no  mere  phrase- 


STYLE  23 

worship,  an  unconscious  literary  tact  has,  for  the  sensi- 
tive, laid  open  a  privileged  pathway  from  one  to  an- 
other. "  The  altar-fire,"  people  say,  "  has  touched 
those  lips  !  "  The  Vulgate,  the  English  Bible,  the 
English  Prayer- Book,  the  writings  of  Swedenborg,  the 
Tracts  for  the  Times : — there,  we  have  instances  of 
widely  different  and  largely  diffused  phases  of  religious 
feeling  in  operation  as  soul  in  style.  But  something 
of  the  same  kind  acts  with  similar  power  in  certain 
writers  of  quite  other  than  theological  literature,  on 
behalf  of  some  wholly  personal  and  peculiar  sense 
of  theirs.  Most  easily  illustrated  by  theological 
literature,  this  quality  lends  to  profane  writers  a 
kind  of  religious  influence.  At  their  best,  these 
writers  become,  as  we  say  sometimes,  "  prophets  "  ; 
such  character  depending  on  the  effect  not  merely 
of  their  matter,  but  of  their  matter  as  allied  to,  in 
"  electric  affinity "  with,  peculiar  form,  and  working 
in  all  cases  by  an  immediate  sympathetic  contact, 
on  which  account  it  is  that  it  may  be  called  soul, 
as  opposed  to  mind,  in  style.  And  this  too  is  a 
faculty  of  choosing  and  rejecting  what  is  congruous 
or  otherwise,  with  a  drift  towards  unity — unity  of 
atmosphere  here,  as  there  of  design — soul  securing 
colour  (or  perfume,  might  we  say  ?)  as  mind  secures 
form,  the  latter  being  essentially  finite,  the  former 
vague  or  infinite,  as  the  influence  of  a  living  person 


24  APPRECIATIONS 

is  practically  infinite.  There  are  some  to  whom 
nothing  has  any  real  interest,  or  real  meaning, 
except  as  operative  in  a  given  person  ;  and  it  is 
they  who  best  appreciate  the  quality  of  soul  in 
literary  art.  They  seem  to  know  a  person,  in  a 
book,  and  make  way  by  intuition  :  yet,  although 
they  thus  enjoy  the  completeness  of  a  personal 
information,  it  is  still  a  characteristic  of  soul,  in  this 
sense  of  the  word,  that  it  does  but  suggest  what  can 
never  be  uttered,  not  as  being  different  from,  or 
more  obscure  than,  what  actually  gets  said,  but  as 
containing  that  plenary  substance  of  which  there  is 
only  one  phase  or  facet  in  what  is  there  expressed. 

If  all  high  things  have  their  martyrs,  Gustave 
Flaubert  might  perhaps  rank  as  the  martyr  of 
literary  style.  In  his  printed  correspondence,  a 
curious  series  of  letters,  written  in  his  twenty-fifth 
year,  records  what  seems  to  have  been  his  one 
other  passion — a  series  of  letters  which,  with  its  fine 
casuistries,  its  firmly  repressed  anguish,  its  tone  of 
harmonious  grey,  and  the  sense  of  disillusion  in 
which  the  whole  matter  ends,  might  have  been,  a 
few  slight  changes  supposed,  one  of  his  own  fictions. 
Writing  to  Madame  X.  certainly  he  does  display, 
by  "  taking  thought "  mainly,  by  constant  and 
delicate  pondering,  as  in  his  love  for  literature,  a 
heart  really  moved,  but  still  more,  and  as  the  pledge 


STYLE  25 

of  that  emotion,  a  loyalty  to  his  work.  Madame  X., 
too,  is  a  literary  artist,  and  the  best  gifts  he  can 
send  her  are  precepts  of  perfection  in  art,  counsels 
for  the  effectual  pursuit  of  that  better  love.  In 
his  love-letters  it  is  the  pains  and  pleasures  of  art 
he  insists  on,  its  solaces  :  he  communicates  secrets, 
reproves,  encourages,  with  a  view  to  that.  Whether 
the  lady  was  dissatisfied  with  such  divided  or 
indirect  service,  the  reader  is  not  enabled  to  see  ; 
but  sees  that,  on  Flaubert's  part  at  least,  a  living 
person  could  be  no  rival  of  what  was,  from  first  to 
last,  his  leading  passion,  a  somewhat  solitary  and 
exclusive  one. 

u  I  must  scold  you,"  he  writes,  "  for  one  thing,  which  shocks, 
scandalises  me,  the  small  concern,  namely,  you  show  for  art 
just  now.  As  regards  glory  be  it  so :  there,  I  approve.  But 
for  art ! — the  one  thing  in  life  that  is  good  and  real — can  you 
compare  with  it  an  earthly  love  ? — prefer  the  adoration  of  a 
relative  beauty  to  the  cultus  of  the  true  beauty  ?  Well !  I 
tell  you  the  truth.  That  is  the  one  thing  good  in  me  :  the  one 
thing  I  have,  to  me  estimable.  For  yourself,  you  blend  with 
the  beautiful  a  heap  of  alien  things,  the  useful,  the  agreeable, 
what  not  ? — 

"  The  only  way  not  to  be  unhappy  is  to  shut  yourself  up  in 
art,  and  count  everything  else  as  nothing.  Pride  takes  the 
place  of  all  beside  when  it  is  established  on  a  large  basis. 
Work !     God  wills  it.     That,  it  seems  to  me,  is  clear. — 

"  I  am  reading  over  again  the  ^Eneid,  certain  verses  of 
which  I  repeat  to  myself  to  satiety.     There  are  phrases  there 


26  APPRECIA  TIONS 

which  stay  in  one's  head,  by  which  I  find  myself  beset,  as  with 
those  musical  airs  which  are  for  ever  returning,  and  cause  you 
pain,  you  love  them  so  much.  I  observe  that  I  no  longer 
laugh  much,  and  am  no  longer  depressed.  I  am  ripe.  You 
talk  of  my  serenity,  and  envy  me.  It  may  well  surprise  you. 
Sick,  irritated,  the  prey  a  thousand  times  a  day  of  cruel  pain, 
I  continue  my  labour  like  a  true  working-man,  who,  with 
sleeves  turned  up,  in  the  sweat  of  his  brow,  beats  away  at  his 
anvil,  never  troubling  himself  whether  it  rains  or  blows,  for 
hail  or  thunder.  I  was  not  like  that  formerly.  The  change 
has  taken  place  naturally,  though  my  will  has  counted  for 
something  in  the  matter. — 

11  Those  who  write  in  good  style  are  sometimes  accused  of 
a  neglect  of  ideas,  and  of  the  moral  end,  as  if  the  end  of  the 
physician  were  something  else  than  healing,  of  the  painter  than 
painting — as  if  the  end  of  art  were  not,  before  all  else,  the 
beautiful." 

What,  then,  did  Flaubert  understand  by  beauty, 
in  the  art  he  pursued  with  so  much  fervour,  with  so 
much  self-command?  Let  us  hear  a  sympathetic 
commentator : — 

"  Possessed  of  an  absolute  belief  that  there  exists  but  one 
way  of  expressing  one  thing,  one  word  to  call  it  by,  one  adjec- 
tive to  qualify,  one  verb  to  animate  it,  he  gave  himself  to 
superhuman  labour  for  the  discovery,  in  every  phrase,  of  that 
word,  that  verb,  that  epithet.  In  this  way,  he  believed  in  some 
mysterious  harmony  of  expression,  and  when  a  true  word 
seemed  to  him  to  lack  euphony  still  went  on  seeking  another, 
with  invincible  patience,  certain  that  he  had  not  yet  got  hold 
of  the  untqtie  word.  ...  A  thousand  preoccupations  would 
beset  him  at    the  same  moment,  always  with  this  desperate 


STYLE  27 

certitude  fixed  in  his  spirit :  Among  all  the  expressions  in 
the  world,  all  forms  and  turns  of  expression,  there  is  but  one — 
one  form,  one  mode — to  express  what  I  want  to  say." 

The  one  word  for  the  one  thing,  the  one  thought, 
amid  the  multitude  of  words,  terms,  that  might  just 
do :  the  problem  of  style  was  there ! — the  unique 
word,  phrase,  sentence,  paragraph,  essay,  or  song, 
absolutely  proper  to  the  single  mental  presentation 
or  vision  within.  In  that  perfect  justice,  over  and 
above  the  many  contingent  and  removable  beauties 
with  which  beautiful  style  may  charm  us,  but  which 
it  can  exist  without,  independent  of  them  yet  dexter- 
ously availing  itself  of  them,  omnipresent  in  good 
work,  in  function  at  every  point,  from  single  epithets 
to  the  rhythm  of  a  whole  book,  lay  the  specific, 
indispensable,  very  intellectual,  beauty  of  literature, 
the  possibility  of  which  constitutes  it  a  fine  art. 

One  seems  to  detect  the  influence  of  a  philosophic 
idea  there,  the  idea  of  a  natural  economy,  of  some 
pre-existent  adaptation,  between  a  relative,  somewhere 
in  the  world  of  thought,  and  its  correlative,  somewhere 
in  the  world  of  language — both  alike,  rather,  some- 
where in  the  mind  of  the  artist,  desiderative,  ex- 
pectant, inventive — meeting  each  other  with  the 
readiness  of  "soul  and  body  reunited,"  in  Blake's 
rapturous  design  ;  and,  in  fact,  Flaubert  was  fond  of 
giving  his  theory  philosophical  expression. — 


28  APPRECIATIONS 

"  There  are  no  beautiful  thoughts,"  he  would  say,  "  without 
beautiful  forms,  and  conversely.  As  it  is  impossible  to  extract 
from  a  physical  body  the  qualities  which  really  constitute  it — 
colour,  extension,  and  the  like — without  reducing  it  to  a  hollow 
abstraction,  in  a  word,  without  destroying  it ;  just  so  it  is  im- 
possible to  detach  the  form  from  the  idea,  for  the  idea  only 
exists  by  virtue  of  the  form." 

All  the  recognised  flowers,  the  removable  orna- 
ments of  literature  (including  harmony  and  ease  in 
reading  aloud,  very  carefully  considered  by  him) 
counted,  certainly ;  for  these  too  are  part  of  the 
actual  value  of  what  one  says.  But  still,  after  all, 
with  Flaubert,  the  search,  the  unwearied  research,  was 
not  for  the  smooth,  or  winsome,  or  forcible  word,  as 
such,  as  with  false  Ciceronians,  but  quite  simply  and 
honestly,  for  the  word's  adjustment  to  its  meaning. 
The  first  condition  of  this  must  be,  of  course,  to  know 
yourself,  to  have  ascertained  your  own  sense  exactly. 
Then,  if  we  suppose  an  artist,  he  says  to  the  reader, — 
I  want  you  to  see  precisely  what  I  see.  Into  the 
mind  sensitive  to  "  form,"  a  flood  of  random  sounds, 
colours,  incidents,  is  ever  penetrating  from  the  world 
without,  to  become,  by  sympathetic  selection,  a  part 
of  its  very  structure,  and,  in  turn,  the  visible  vesture 
and  expression  of  that  other  world  it  sees  so  steadily 
within,  nay,  already  with  a  partial  conformity  thereto, 
to  be  refined,  enlarged,  corrected,  at  a  hundred 
points  ;  and  it  is  just  there,  just  at  those  doubtful 


STYLE  29 

points  that  the  function  of  style,  as  tact  or  taste, 
intervenes.  The  unique  term  will  come  more  quickly 
to  one  than  another,  at  one  time  than  another, 
according  also  to  the  kind  of  matter  in  question. 
Quickness  and  slowness,  ease  and  closeness  alike, 
have  nothing  to  do  with  the  artistic  character  of  the 
true  word  found  at  last.  As  there  is  a  charm  of 
ease,  so  there  is  also  a  special  charm  in  the  signs  of 
discovery,  of  effort  and  contention  towards  a  due 
end,  as  so  often  with  Flaubert  himself — in  the  style 
which  has  been  pliant,  as  only  obstinate,  durable 
metal  can  be,  to  the  inherent  perplexities  and  re- 
cusancy of  a  certain  difficult  thought. 

If  Flaubert  had  not  told  us,  perhaps  we  should 
never  have  guessed  how  tardy  r.nd  painful  his  own 
procedure  really  was,  and  after  reading  his  confession 
may  think  that  his  almost  endless  hesitation  had 
much  to  do  with  diseased  nerves.  Often,  perhaps, 
the  felicity  supposed  will  be  the  product  of  a  happier, 
a  more  exuberant  nature  than  Flaubert's.  Aggra- 
vated, certainly,  by  a  morbid  physical  condition,  that 
anxiety  in  "  seeking  the  phrase,"  which  gathered  all 
the  other  small  ennuis  of  a  really  quiet  existence  into 
a  kind  of  battle,  was  connected  with  his  lifelong 
contention  against  facile  poetry,  facile  art — art,  facile 
and  flimsy ;  and  what  constitutes  the  true  artist  is 
not   the   slowness   or  quickness   of  the  process,  but 


30  APPRECIA  TIONS 

the  absolute  success  of  the  result.  As  with  those 
labourers  in  the  parable,  the  prize  is  independent  of 
the  mere  length  of  the  actual  day's  work.  "You 
talk,"  he  writes,  odd,  trying  lover,  to  Madame  X. — 

"  You  talk  of  the  exclusiveness  of  my  literary  tastes.  That 
might  have  enabled  you  to  divine  what  kind  of  a  person  I  am 
in  the  matter  of  love.  I  grow  so  hard  to  please  as  a  literary 
artist,  that  I  am  driven  to  despair.  I  shall  end  by  not  writing 
another  line." 

"  Happy,"  he  cries,  in  a  moment  of  discourage- 
ment at  that  patient  labour,  which  for  him,  certainly, 
was  the  condition  of  a  great  success — 

"  Happy  those  who  have  no  doubts  of  themselves  !  who 
lengthen  out,  as  the  pen  runs  on,  all  that  flows  forth  from  their 
brains.  As  for  me,  I  hesitate,  I  disappoint  myself,  turn  round 
upon  myself  in  despite :  my  taste  is  augmented  in  proportion  as 
my  natural  vigour  decreases,  and  I  afflict  my  soul  over  some 
dubious  word  out  of  all  proportion  to  the  pleasure  I  get  from  a 
whole  page  of  good  writing.  One  would  have  to  live  two 
centuries  to  attain  a  true  idea  of  any  matter  whatever.  What 
Buffon  said  is  a  big  blasphemy  :  genius  is  not  long-continued 
patience.  Still,  there  is  some  truth  in  the  statement,  and  more 
than  people  think,  especially  as  regards  our  own  day.  Art ! 
art !  art !  bitter  deception !  phantom  that  glows  with  light, 
only  to  lead  one  on  to  destruction." 

Again — 

"  I  am  growing  so  peevish  about  my  writing.  I  am  like  a 
man  whose  ear  is  true  but  who  plays  falsely  on  the  violin  :  his 
fingers  refuse  to  reproduce  precisely  those  sounds  of  which  he 


STYLE  31 

has  the  inward  sense.     Then  the  tears  come  rolling  down  from 
the  poor  scraper's  eyes  and  the  bow  falls  from  his  hand." 

Coming  slowly  or  quickly,  when  it  comes,  as  it 
came  with  so  much  labour  of  mind,  but  also  with  so 
much  lustre,  to  Gustave  Flaubert,  this  discovery  of 
the  word  will  be,  like  all  artistic  success  and  felicity, 
incapable  of  strict  analysis :  effect  of  an  intuitive 
condition  of  mind,  it  must  be  recognised  by  like 
intuition  on  the  part  of  the  reader,  and  a  sort  of 
immediate  sense.  In  every  one  of  those  masterly 
sentences  of  Flaubert  there  was,  below  all  mere 
contrivance,  shaping  and  afterthought,  by  some 
happy  instantaneous  concourse  of  the  various  facul- 
ties of  the  mind  with  each  other,  the  exact  appre- 
hension of  what  was  needed  to  carry  the  meaning. 
And  that  it  fits  with  absolute  justice  will  be  a  judg- 
ment of  immediate  sense  in  the  appreciative  reader. 
We  all  feel  this  in  what  may  be  called  inspired  trans- 
lation. Well  !  all  language  involves  translation  from 
inward  to  outward.  In  literature,  as  in  all  forms  of 
art,  there  are  the  absolute  and  the  merely  relative  or 
accessory  beauties  ;  and  precisely  in  that  exact  pro- 
portion of  the  term  to  its  purpose  is  the  absolute 
beauty  of  style,  prose  or  verse.  All  the  good  quali- 
ties, the  beauties,  of  verse  also,  are  such,  only  as 
precise  expression. 

In  the  highest  as  in  the  lowliest  literature,  then,  the 


32  APPRECIA  TIONS 

one  indispensable  beauty  is,  after  all,  truth  : — truth 
to  bare  fact  in  the  latter,  as  to  some  personal  sense  of 
fact,  diverted  somewhat  from  men's  ordinary  sense  of 
it,  in  the  former  ;  truth  there  as  accuracy,  truth  here  as 
expression,  that  finest  and  most  intimate  form  of  truth, 
the  vraie  vfrite.  And  what  an  eclectic  principle  this 
really  is  !  employing  for  its  one  sole  purpose — that 
absolute  accordance  of  expression  to  idea — all  other 
literary  beauties  and  excellences  whatever  :  how  many 
kinds  of  style  it  covers,  explains,  justifies,  and  at  the 
same  time  safeguards !  Scott's  facility,  Flaubert's 
deeply  pondered  evocation  of  "the  phrase,"  are  equally 
good  art.  Say  what  you  have  to  say,  what  you  have  a 
will  to  say,  in  the  simplest,  the  most  direct  and  exact 
manner  possible,  with  no  surplusage  : — there,  is  the 
justification  of  the  sentence  so  fortunately  born, 
"  entire,  smooth,  and  round,"  that  it  needs  no  punc- 
tuation, and  also  (that  is  the  point !)  of  the  most 
elaborate  period,  if  it  be  right  in  its  elaboration. 
Here  is  the  office  of  ornament :  here  also  the  purpose 
of  restraint  in  ornament.  As  the  exponent  of  truth, 
that  austerity  (the  beauty,  the  function,  of  which  in 
literature  Flaubert  understood  so  well)  becomes  not 
the  correctness  or  purism  of  the  mere  scholar,  but  a 
security  against  the  otiose,  a  jealous  exclusion  of 
what  does  not  really  tell  towards  the  pursuit  of  relief, 
of  life  and  vigour  in  the  portraiture  of  one's  sense. 


STYLE  33 

License  again,  the  making  free  with  rule,  if  it  be 
indeed,  as  people  fancy,  a  habit  of  genius,  flinging 
aside  or  transforming  all  that  opposes  the  liberty  of 
beautiful  production,  will  be  but  faith  to  one's  own 
meaning.  The  seeming  baldness  of  Le  Rouge  et  Le 
Noir  is  nothing  in  itself ;  the  wild  ornament  of  Les 
Mise'rables  is  nothing  in  itself;  and  the  restraint  of 
Flaubert,  amid  a  real  natural  opulence,  only  redoubled 
beauty — the  phrase  so  large  and  so  precise  at  the 
same  time,  hard  as  bronze,  in  service  to  the  more 
perfect  adaptation  of  words  to  their  matter.  After- 
thoughts, retouchings,  finish,  will  be  of  profit  only  so 
far  as  they  too  really  serve  to  bring  out  the  original, 
initiative,  generative,  sense  in  them. 

In  this  way,  according  to  the  well-known  saying, 
"  The  style  is  the  man,"  complex  or  simple,  in  his 
individuality,  his  plenary  sense  of  what  he  really  has 
to  say,  his  sense  of  the  world  ;  all  cautions  regarding 
style  arising  out  of  so  many  natural  scruples  as  to  the 
medium  through  which  alone  he  can  expose  that  in- 
ward sense  of  things,  the  purity  of  this  medium,  its  laws 
or  tricks  of  refraction  :  nothing  is  to  be  left  there 
which  might  give  conveyance  to  any  matter  save  that. 
Style  in  all  its  varieties,  reserved  or  opulent,  terse, 
abundant,  musical,  stimulant,  academic,  so  long  as 
each  is  really  characteristic  or  expressive,  finds  thus 
its  justification,  the  sumptuous  good  taste  of  Cicero 


34  APPRECIA  TIONS 

being  as  truly  the  man  himself,  and  not  another, 
justified,  yet  insured  inalienably  to  him,  thereby,  as 
would  have  been  his  portrait  by  Raffaelle,  in  full 
consular  splendour,  on  his  ivory  chair. 

A  relegation,  you  may  say  perhaps — a  relegation 
of  style  to  the  subjectivity,  the  mere  caprice,  of  the 
individual,  which  must  soon  transform  it  into  man- 
nerism. Not  so  !  since  there  is,  under  the  conditions 
supposed,  for  those  elements  of  the  man,  for  every 
lineament  of  the  vision  within,  the  one  word,  the  one 
acceptable  word,  recognisable  by  the  sensitive,  by 
others  "  who  have  intelligence "  in  the  matter,  as 
absolutely  as  ever  anything  can  be  in  the  evanescent 
and  delicate  region  of  human  language.  The  style, 
the  manner,  would  be  the  man,  not  in  his  unreasoned 
and  really  uncharacteristic  caprices,  involuntary  or 
affected,  but  in  absolutely  sincere  apprehension  of 
what  is  most  real  to  him.  But  let  us  hear  our 
French  guide  again. — 

"  Styles,"  says  Flaubert's  commentator,  "  Styles,  as  so  many 
peculiar  moulds,  each  of  which  bears  the  mark  of  a  particular 
writer,  who  is  to  pour  into  it  the  whole  content  of  his  ideas, 
were  no  part  of  his  theory.  What  he  believed  in  was  Style  : 
that  is  to  say,  a  certain  absolute  and  unique  manner  of  express- 
ing a  thing,  in  all  its  intensity  and  colour.  For  him  the  form 
was  the  work  itself.  As  in  living  creatures,  the  blood,  nourish- 
ing the  body,  determines  its  very  contour  and  external  aspect, 
just  so,  to  his  mind,  the  matter,  the  basis,  in  a  work  of  art, 


STYLE  35 

imposed,  necessarily,  the  unique,  the  just  expression,  the  mea- 
sure, the  rhythm — the  form  in  all  its  characteristics." 

If  the  style  be  the  man,  in  all  the  colour  and 
intensity  of  a  veritable  apprehension,  it  will  be  in  a 
real  sense  "  impersonal." 

I  said,  thinking  of  books  like  Victor  Hugo's  Les 
Mz'sfrables,  that  prose  literature  was  the  characteristic 
art  of  the  nineteenth  century,  as  others,  thinking  of 
its  triumphs  since  the  youth  of  Bach,  have  assigned 
that  place  to  music.  Music  and  prose  literature  are, 
in  one  sense,  the  opposite  terms  of  art  ;  the  art  of 
literature  presenting  to  the  imagination,  through  the 
intelligence,  a  range  of  interests,  as  free  and  various 
as  those  which  music  presents  to  it  through  sense. 
And  certainly  the  tendency  of  what  has  been  here 
said  is  to  bring  literature  too  under  those  conditions, 
by  conformity  to  which  music  takes  rank  as  the 
typically  perfect  art.  If  music  be  the  ideal  of  all  art 
whatever,  precisely  because  in  music  it  is  impossible 
to  distinguish  the  form  from  the  substance  or  matter, 
the  subject  from  the  expression,  then,  literature, 
by  finding  its  specific  excellence  in  the  absolute 
correspondence  of  the  term  to  its  import,  will  be 
but  fulfilling  the  condition  of  all  artistic  quality  in 
things  everywhere,  of  all  good  art. 

Good  art,  but  not  necessarily  great  art ;  the 
distinction  between  great  art  and  good  art  depend- 


36  APPRECIA  TIONS 

ing  immediately,  as  regards  literature  at  all  events, 
not  on  its  form,  but  on  the  matter.  Thackeray's 
Esmond,  surely,  is  greater  art  than  Vanity  Fair,  by 
the  greater  dignity  of  its  interests.  It  is  on  the 
quality  of  the  matter  it  informs  or  controls,  its 
compass,  its  variety,  its  alliance  to  great  ends,  or 
the  depth  of  the  note  of  revolt,  or  the  largeness  of 
hope  in  it,  that  the  greatness  of  literary  art  depends, 
as  The  Divine  Comedy,  Paradise  Lost,  Les  Miserables, 
The  English  Bible,  are  great  art.  Given  the  condi- 
tions I  have  tried  to  explain  as  constituting  good 
art; — then,  if  it  be  devoted  further  to  the  increase 
of  men's  happiness,  to  the  redemption  of  the 
oppressed,  or  the  enlargement  of  our  sympathies 
with  each  other,  or  to  such  presentment  of  new  or 
old  truth  about  ourselves  and  our  relation  to  the 
world  as  may  ennoble  and  fortify  us  in  our  sojourn 
here,  or  immediately,  as  with  Dante,  to  the  glory  of 
God,  it  will  be  also  great  art ;  if,  over  and  above 
those  qualities  I  summed  up  as  mind  and  soul — 
that  colour  and  mystic  perfume,  and  that  reasonable 
structure,  it  has  something  of  the  soul  of  humanity 
in  it,  and  finds  its  logical,  its  architectural  place,  in 
the  great  structure  of  human  life. 

1888. 


WORDSWORTH 

Some  English  critics  at  the  beginning  of  the  present 
century  had  a  great  deal  to  say  concerning  a  dis- 
tinction, of  much  importance,  as  they  thought,  in  the 
true  estimate  of  poetry,  between  the  Fancy,  and 
another  more  powerful  faculty — the  Imagination. 
This  metaphysical  distinction,  borrowed  originally 
from  the  writings  of  German  philosophers,  and  per- 
haps not  always  clearly  apprehended  by  those  who 
talked  of  it,  involved  a  far  deeper  and  more  vital  dis- 
tinction, with  which  indeed  all  true  criticism  more  or 
less  directly  has  to  do,  the  distinction,  namely,  be- 
tween higher  and  lower  degrees  of  intensity  in  the 
poet's  perception  of  his  subject,  and  in  his  concen- 
tration of  himself  upon  his  work.  Of  those  who 
dwelt  upon  the  metaphysical  distinction  between 
the  Fancy  and  the  Imagination,  it  was  Wordsworth 
who  made  the  most  of  it,  assuming  it  as  the  basis 
for  the  final  classification  of  his  poetical  writings  ; 
and  it  is  in  these  writings  that  the  deeper  and  more 

D 


38  APPRECIATIONS 

vital  distinction,  which,  as  I  have  said,  underlies  the 
metaphysical  distinction,  is  most  needed,  and  may 
best  be  illustrated. 

For  nowhere  is  there  so  perplexed  a  mixture  as 
in  Wordsworth's  own  poetry,  of  work  touched  with 
intense  and  individual  power,  with  work  of  almost 
no  character  at  all.  He  has  much  conventional 
sentiment,  and  some  of  that  insincere  poetic  diction, 
against  which  his  most  serious  critical  efforts  were 
directed  :  the  reaction  in  his  political  ideas,  conse- 
quent on  the  excesses  of  1795,  makes  him,  at  times, 
a  mere  declaimer  on  moral  and  social  topics  ;  and 
he  seems,  sometimes,  to  force  an  unwilling  pen,  and 
write  by  rule.  By  making  the  most  of  these 
blemishes  it  is  possible  to  obscure  the  true  aesthetic 
value  of  his  work,  just  as  his  life  also,  a  life  of  much 
quiet  delicacy  and  independence,  might  easily  be 
placed  in  a  false  focus,  and  made  to  appear  a  some- 
what tame  theme  in  illustration  of  the  more  obvious 
parochial  virtues.  And  those  who  wish  to  under- 
stand his  influence,  and  experience  his  peculiar 
savour,  must  bear  with  patience  the  presence  of  an 
alien  element  in  Wordsworth's  work,  which  never 
coalesced  with  what  is  really  delightful  in  it,  nor 
underwent  his  special  power.  Who  that  values  his 
writings  most  has  not  felt  the  intrusion  there,  from 
time  to  time,  of  something  tedious  and  prosaic  ?     Of 


WORDSWORTH  39 

all  poets  equally  great,  he  would  gain  most  by  a 
skilfully  made  anthology.      Such  a  selection  would 
show,  in  truth,  not  so  much  what  he  was,  or  to  him- 
self or  others  seemed  to  be,  as  what,  by  the  more 
energetic  and  fertile  quality  in  his  writings,  he  was 
ever  tending  to  become.     And  the  mixture  in  his 
work,  as  it  actually  stands,  is  so  perplexed,  that  one 
fears  to  miss  the  least  promising  composition  even, 
lest  some  precious  morsel  should    be  lying  hidden 
within — the  few  perfect  lines,  the  phrase,  the  single 
word  perhaps,  to  which  he  often  works  up  mechani- 
cally through  a  poem,  almost  the  whole  of  which 
may  be  tame  enough.      He  who  thought  that  in  all 
creative  work  the  larger  part  was  given  passively,  to 
the  recipient  mind,  who  waited  so  dutifully  upon  the 
gift,  to  whom  so   large  a  measure  was    sometimes 
given,  had  his  times  also  of  desertion  and  relapse ; 
and  he  has  permitted  the  impress  of  these  too  to 
remain  in  his  work.     And  this  duality  there — the 
fitfulness  with  which    the  higher  qualities  manifest 
themselves  in  it,  gives  the  effect  in  his  poetry  of  a 
power  not  altogether  his  own,  or  under  his  control, 
which  comes  and  goes  when  it  will,  lifting  or  lower- 
ing a  matter,  poor  in  itself;  so  that  that  old  fancy 
which   made  the  poet's  art  an  enthusiasm,  a  form 
of  divine  possession,  seems  almost  literally  true  of 
him. 


40  APPRECIATIONS 

This  constant  suggestion  of  an  absolute  duality 
between  higher  and  lower  moods,  and  the  work  done 
in  them,  stimulating  one  always  to  look  below  the 
surface,  makes  the  reading  of  Wordsworth  an  ex- 
cellent sort  of  training  towards  the  things  of  art 
and  poetry.  It  begets  in  those,  who,  coming  across 
him  in  youth,  can  bear  him  at  all,  a  habit  of  reading 
between  the  lines,  a  faith  in  the  effect  of  concentration 
and  collectedness  of  mind  in  the  right  appreciation 
of  poetry,  an  expectation  of  things,  in  this  order, 
coming  to  one  by  means  of  a  right  discipline  of  the 
temper  as  well  as  of  the  intellect  He  meets  us  with 
the  promise  that  he  has  much,  and  something  very 
peculiar,  to  give  us,  if  we  will  follow  a  certain  difficult 
way,  and  seems  to  have  the  secret  of  a  special  and 
privileged  state  of  mind.  And  those  who  have 
undergone  his  influence,  and  followed  this  difficult 
way,  are  like  people  who  have  passed  through  some 
initiation,  a  disciplina  arcani,  by  submitting  to  which 
they  become  able  constantly  to  distinguish  in  art, 
speech,  feeling,  manners,  that  which  is  organic, 
animated,  expressive,  from  that  which  is  only  con- 
ventional, derivative,  inexpressive. 

But  although  the  necessity  of  selecting  these 
precious  morsels  for  oneself  is  an  opportunity  for 
the  exercise  of  Wordsworth's  peculiar  influence,  and 
induces  a  kind  of  just  criticism  and  true  estimate 


WORDSWORTH  41 

of  it,  yet  the  purely  literary  product  would  have 
been  more  excellent,  had  the  writer  himself  purged 
away  that  alien  element.  How  perfect  would  have 
been  the  little  treasury,  shut  between  the  covers  of 
how  thin  a  book !  Let  us  suppose  the  desired 
separation  made,  the  electric  thread  untwined,  the 
golden  pieces,  great  and  small,  lying  apart  together.* 
What  are  the  peculiarities  of  this  residue  ?  What 
special  sense  does  Wordsworth  exercise,  and  what 
instincts  does  he  satisfy  ?  What  are  the  subjects 
and  the  motives  which  in  him  excite  the  imaginative 
faculty  ?  What  are  the  qualities  in  things  and  per- 
sons which  he  values,  the  impression  and  sense  of 
which  he  can  convey  to  others,  in  an  extraordinary 
way  ? 

An  intimate  consciousness  of  the  expression  of 
natural  things,  which  weighs,  listens,  penetrates,  where 
the  earlier  mind  passed  roughly  by,  is  a  large  element 
in  the  complexion  of  modern  poetry.  It  has  been 
remarked  as  a  fact  in  mental  history  again  and  again. 
It  reveals  itself  in  many  forms  ;  but  is  strongest  and 
most  attractive  in  what  is  strongest  and  most  attract- 
ive in  modern  literature.  It  is  exemplified,  almost 
equally,  by  writers  as  unlike  each  other  as  Senancour 

*  Since  this  essay  was  written,  such  selections  have  been  made,  with 
excellent  taste,  by  Matthew  Arnold  and  Professor  Knight. 


42  APPRECIA  TIONS 

and  Theophile  Gautier :  as  a  singular  chapter  in  the 
history  of  the  human  mind,  its   growth    might    be 
traced  from  Rousseau  to  Chateaubriand,  from  Chateau- 
briand to  Victor  Hugo  :  it  has  doubtless  some  latent 
connexion    with    those    pantheistic    theories    which 
locate  an  intelligent  soul  in  material  things,  and  have 
largely    exercised     men's    minds    in    some    modern 
systems  of  philosophy :  it  is  traceable  even  in  the 
graver  writings  of   historians :    it    makes    as   much 
difference  between  ancient  and  modern  landscape  art, 
as  there  is  between  the  rough    masks  of  an  early 
mosaic  and  a  portrait  by  Reynolds  or  Gainsborough. 
Of  this  new  sense,  the  writings  of  Wordsworth  are 
the  central  and  elementary  expression :  he  is  more 
simply  and  entirely  occupied  with  it  than  any  other 
poet,  though  there  are  fine  expressions  of  precisely 
the  same    thing  in   so  different  a  poet  as  Shelley. 
There  was  in  his  own  character  a  certain  content- 
ment, a  sort  of   inborn  religious    placidity,  seldom 
found    united   with  a  sensibility  so    mobile  as    his, 
which  was  favourable  to  the  quiet,  habitual  observa- 
tion of  inanimate,  or  imperfectly  animate,  existence. 
His  life  of  eighty  years  is  divided  by  no  very  pro- 
foundly felt  incidents  :  its  changes  are  almost  wholly 
inward,  and   it  falls  into  broad,  untroubled,  perhaps 
somewhat    monotonous    spaces.     What  it  most  re- 
sembles is  the  life  of  one  of  those  early  Italian  or 


WORDSWORTH  43 

Flemish  painters,  who,  just  because  their  minds  were 
full  of  heavenly  visions,  passed,  some  of  them,  the 
better  part  of  sixty  years  in  quiet,  systematic  industry. 
This  placid  life  matured  a  quite  unusual  sensibility, 
really  innate  in  him,  to  the  sights  and  sounds  of  the 
natural  world — the  flower  and  its  shadow  on  the 
stone,  the  cuckoo  and  its  echo.  The  poem  of 
Resolution  and  Independence  is  a  storehouse  of  such 
records :  for  its  fulness  of  imagery  it  may  be  com- 
pared to  Keats's  Saint  Agnes'  Eve.  To  read  one  of 
his  longer  pastoral  poems  for  the  first  time,  is  like  a 
day  spent  in  a  new  country  :  the  memory  is  crowded 
for  a  while  with  its  precise  and  vivid  incidents — 

"  The  pliant  harebell  swinging  in  the  breeze 
On  some  grey  rock  "  ; — 

"  The  single  sheep  and  the  one  blasted  tree 
And  the  bleak  music  from  that  old  stone  wall "  ; — 

"  In  the  meadows  and  the  lower  ground 
Was  all  the  sweetness  of  a  common  dawn  "  ; — 

"  And  that  green  corn  all  day  is  rustling  in  thine  ears." 

Clear  and  delicate  at  once,  as  he  is  in  the  outlining 
of  visible  imagery,  he  is  more  clear  and  delicate  still, 
and  finely  scrupulous,  in  the  noting  of  sounds;  so  that 
he  conceives  of  noble  sound  as  even  moulding  the 
human  countenance  to  nobler  types,  and  as  something 
actually  "  profaned  "  by  colour,  by  visible  form,  or 
image.     He  has  a  power  likewise  of  realising,  and  con- 


44  APPRECIATIONS 

veying  to  the  consciousness  of  the  reader,  abstract  and 
elementary  impressions — silence,  darkness,  absolute 
motionlessness  :  or,  again,  the  whole  complex  senti- 
ment of  a  particular  place,  the  abstract  expression  of 
desolation  in  the  long  white  road,  of  peacefulness  in 
a  particular  folding  of  the  hills.  In  the  airy  building 
of  the  brain,  a  special  day  or  hour  even,  comes  to 
have  for  him  a  sort  of  personal  identity,  a  spirit  or 
angel  given  to  it,  by  which,  for  its  exceptional  insight, 
or  the  happy  light  upon  it,  it  has  a  presence  in  one's 
history,  and  acts  there,  as  a  separate  power  or 
accomplishment ;  and  he  has  celebrated  in  many  of 
his  poems  the  "  efficacious  spirit,"  which,  as  he  says, 
resides  in  these  "  particular  spots  "  of  time. 

It  is  to  such  a  world,  and  to  a  world  of  congruous 
meditation  thereon,  that  we  see  him  retiring  in  his 
but  lately  published  poem  of  The  Recluse — taking 
leave,  without  much  count  of  costs,  of  the  world  of 
business,  of  action  and  ambition,  as  also  of  all  that 
for  the  majority  of  mankind  counts  as  sensuous 
enjoyment* 

*  In  Wordsworth's  prefatory  advertisement  to  the  first  edition 
of  The  Prelude,  published  in  1850,  it  is  stated  that  that  work 
was  intended  to  be  introductory  to  The  Recluse;  and  that  The 
Recluse,  if  completed,  would  have  consisted  of  three  parts.  The 
second  part  is  "The  Excursion."  The  third  part  was  only  planned  ; 
but  the  first  book  of  the  first  part  was  left  in  manuscript  by  Wordsworth 
— though  in  manuscript,  it  is  said,  in  no  great  condition  of  forwardness 


WORDSWORTH  45 

And  so  it  came  about  that  this  sense  of  a  life  in 
natural  objects,  which  in  most  poetry  is  but  a  rhetori- 
cal artifice,  is  with  Wordsworth  the  assertion  of  what 
for  him  is  almost  literal  fact.      To  him  every  natural 

for  the  printers.  This  book,  now  for  the  first  time  printed  in  extenso 
(a  very  noble  passage  from  it  found  place  in  that  prose  advertise- 
ment to  The  Excursion),  is  included  in  the  latest  edition  of 
Wordsworth  by  Mr.  John  Morley.  It  was  well  worth  adding  to  the 
poet's  great  bequest  to  English  literature.  A  true  student  of  his 
work,  who  has  formulated  for  himself  what  he  supposes  to  be  the 
leading  characteristics  of  Wordsworth's  genius,  will  feel,  we  think, 
lively  interest  in  testing  them  by  the  various  fine  passages  in  what  is 
here   presented  for   the  first    time.       Let    the  following   serve  for  a 

sample  : — 

Thickets  full  of  songsters,  and  the  voice 
Of  lordly  birds,  an  unexpected  sound 
Heard  now  and  then  from  morn  to  latest  eve, 
Admonishing  the  man  who  walks  below 
Of  solitude  and  silence  in  the  sky  : — 
These  have  we,  and  a  thousand  nooks  of  earth 
Have  also  these,  but  nowhere  else  is  found, 
Nowhere  (or  is  it  fancy?)  can  be  found 
The  one  sensation  that  is  here  ;  'tis  here, 
Here  as  it  found  its  way  into  my  heart 
In  childhood,  here  as  it  abides  by  day, 
By  night,  here  only  ;  or  in  chosen  minds 
That  take  it  with  them  hence,  where'er  they  go. 
— 'Tis,  but  I  cannot  name  it,  'tis  the  sense 
Of  majesty,  and  beauty,  and  repose, 
A  blended  holiness  of  earth  and  sky, 
Something  that  makes  this  individual  spot, 
This  small  abiding-place  of  many  men, 
A  termination,  and  a  last  retreat, 
A  centre,  come  from  whereso'er  you  will, 
A  whole  without  dependence  or  defect, 
Made  for  itself,  and  happy  in  itself, 
Perfect  contentment,  Unity  entire. 


46  APPRECIATIONS 

object  seemed  to  possess  more  or  less  of  a  moral  or 
spiritual  life,  to  be  capable  of  a  companionship  with 
man,  full  of  expression,  of  inexplicable  affinities  and 
delicacies  of  intercourse.  An  emanation,  a  particular 
spirit,  belonged,  not  to  the  moving  leaves  or  water 
only,  but  to  the  distant  peak  of  the  hills  arising 
suddenly,  by  some  change  of  perspective,  above  the 
nearer  horizon,  to  the  passing  space  of  light  across 
the  plain,  to  the  lichened  Druidic  stone  even,  for  a 
certain  weird  fellowship  in  it  with  the  moods  of  men. 
It  was  like  a  "  survival,"  in  the  peculiar  intellectual 
temperament  of  a  man  of  letters  at  the  end  of  the 
eighteenth  century,  of  that  primitive  condition,  which 
some  philosophers  have  traced  in  the  general  history 
of  human  culture,  wherein  all  outward  objects  alike, 
including  even  the  works  of  men's  hands,  were  be- 
lieved to  be  endowed  with  animation,  and  the  world 
was  "  full  of  souls  " — that  mood  in  which  the  old 
Greek  gods  were  first  begotten,  and  which  had  many 
strange  aftergrowths. 

In  the  early  ages,  this  belief,  delightful  as  its 
effects  on  poetry  often  are,  was  but  the  result  of  a 
crude  intelligence.  But,  in  Wordsworth,  such  power 
of  seeing  life,  such  perception  of  a  soul,  in  inanimate 
things,  came  of  an  exceptional  susceptibility  to  the 
impressions  of  eye  and  ear,  and  was,  in  its  essence,  a 
kind  of  sensuousness.      At  least,  it  is  only  in  a  tem- 


WORDSWORTH  47 

perament  exceptionally  susceptible  on  the  sensuous 
side,  that  this  sense  of  the  expressiveness  of  outward 
things  comes  to  be  so  large  a  part  of  life.  That  he 
awakened  "  a  sort  of  thought  in  sense,"  is  Shelley's 
just  estimate  of  this  element  in  Wordsworth's  poetry. 
And  it  was  through  nature,  thus  ennobled  by  a 
semblance  of  passion  and  thought,  that  he  approached 
the  spectacle  of  human  life.  Human  life,  indeed,  is 
for  him,  at  first,  only  an  additional,  accidental  grace 
on  an  expressive  landscape.  When  he  thought  of 
man,  it  was  of  man  as  in  the  presence  and  under 
the  influence  of  these  effective  natural  objects,  and 
linked  to  them  by  many  associations.  The  close 
connexion  of  man  with  natural  objects,  the  habitual 
association  of  his  thoughts  and  feelings  with  a  par- 
ticular spot  of  earth,  has  sometimes  seemed  to  degrade 
those  who  are  subject  to  its  influence,  as  if  it  did  but 
reinforce  that  physical  connexion  of  our  nature  with 
the  actual  lime  and  clay  of  the  soil,  which  is  always 
drawing  us  nearer  to  our  end.  But  for  Wordsworth, 
these  influences  tended  to  the  dignity  of  human 
nature,  because  they  tended  to  tranquillise  it.  By 
raising  nature  to  the  level  of  human  thought  he  gives 
it  power  and  expression :  he  subdues  man  to  the 
level  of  nature,  and  gives  him  thereby  a  certain 
breadth  and  coolness  and  solemnity.  The  leech- 
gatherer  on  the  moor,  the  woman  "stepping  westward," 


48  APPRECIATIONS 

are  for  him  natural  objects,  almost  in  the  same  sense 
as  the  aged  thorn,  or  the  lichened  rock  on  the  heath. 
In  this  sense  the  leader  of  the  "  Lake  School,"  in 
spite  of  an  earnest  preoccupation  with  man,  his 
thoughts,  his  destiny,  is  the  poet  of  nature.  And  of 
nature,  after  all,  in  its  modesty.  The  English  lake 
country  has,  of  course,  its  grandeurs.  But  the 
peculiar  function  of  Wordsworth's  genius,  as  carrying 
in  it  a  power  to  open  out  the  soul  of  apparently  little 
or  familiar  things,  would  have  found  its  true  test  had 
he  become  the  poet  of  Surrey,  say  !  and  the  prophet 
of  its  life.  The  glories  of  Italy  and  Switzerland, 
though  he  did  write  a  little  about  them,  had  too 
potent  a  material  life  of  their  own  to  serve  greatly 
his  poetic  purpose. 

Religious  sentiment,  consecrating  the  affections 
and  natural  regrets  of  the  human  heart,  above  all,  that 
pitiful  awe  and  care  for  the  perishing  human  clay,  of 
which  relic- worship  is  but  the  corruption,  has  always 
had  much  to  do  with  localities,  with  the  thoughts  which 
attach  themselves  to  actual  scenes  and  places.  Now 
what  is  true  of  it  everywhere,  is  truest  of  it  in  those 
secluded  valleys  where  one  generation  after  another 
maintains  the  same  abiding -place  ;  and  it  was  on 
this  side,  that  Wordsworth  apprehended  religion  most 
strongly.  Consisting,  as  it  did  so  much,  in  the 
recognition  of  local  sanctities,  in  the  habit  of  con- 


WORDSWORTH  49 

necting  the  stones  and  trees  of  a  particular  spot  of 
earth  with  the  great  events  of  life,  till  the  low  walls, 
the  green  mounds,  the  half-obliterated  epitaphs  seemed 
full  of  voices,  and  a  sort  of  natural  oracles,  the  very 
religion  of  these  people  of  the  dales  appeared  but  as 
another  link  between  them  and  the  earth,  and  was 
literally  a  religion  of  nature.  It  tranquillised  them 
by  bringing  them  under  the  placid  rule  of  traditional 
and  narrowly  localised  observances.  "  Grave  livers," 
they  seemed  to  him,  under  this  aspect,  with  stately 
speech,  and  something  of  that  natural  dignity  of 
manners,  which  underlies  the  highest  courtesy. 

And,  seeing  man  thus  as  a  part  of  nature,  elevated 
and  solemnised  in  proportion  as  his  daily  life  and 
occupations  brought  him  into  companionship  with 
permanent  natural  objects,  his  very  religion  forming 
new  links  for  him  with  the  narrow  limits  of  the 
valley,  the  low  vaults  of  his  church,  the  rough  stones 
of  his  home,  made  intense  for  him  now  with  pro- 
found sentiment,  Wordsworth  was  able  to  appreciate 
passion  in  the  lowly.  He  chooses  to  depict  people 
from  humble  life,  because,  being  nearer  to  nature  than 
others,  they  are  on  the  whole  more  impassioned, 
certainly  more  direct  in  their  expression  of  passion, 
than  other  men  :  it  is  for  this  direct  expression  of 
passion,  that  he  values  their  humble  words.  In  much 
that  he  said  in  exaltation  of  rural  life,  he  was  but 


50  APPRECIA  TIONS 

pleading   indirectly   for   that   sincerity,   that   perfect 

fidelity   to  one's  own   inward    presentations,  to   the 

precise  features  of  the  picture  within,  without  which 

any  profound  poetry  is  impossible.      It  was  not  for 

their  tameness,  but  for  this  passionate  sincerity,  that 

he  chose  incidents  and  situations  from  common  life, 

"  related  in  a  selection  of  language  really  used  by 

men."       He    constantly    endeavours    to    bring    his 

language  near  to  the  real  language  of  men  :  to  the 

real  language  of  men,  however,  not  on  the  dead  level 

of  their  ordinary  intercourse,  but  in  select  moments 

of  vivid  sensation,  when  this  language  is  winnowed 

and  ennobled  by  excitement.     There  are  poets  who 

have    chosen    rural    life    as    their    subject,    for    the 

sake    of    its    passionless    repose,    and    times    when 

Wordsworth     himself    extols    the    mere    calm    and 

dispassionate  survey  of  things  as  the  highest  aim  of 

poetical  culture.     But  it  was  not  for  such  passionless 

calm  that  he  preferred  the  scenes  of  pastoral  life  ; 

and   the   meditative   poet,  sheltering   himself,    as    it 

might  seem,  from  the  agitations  of  the  outward  world, 

is  in  reality  only  clearing   the  scene  for  the  great 

exhibitions   of  emotion,  and   what   he   values    most 

is  the  almost'  elementary  expression  of  elementary 

feelings. 

And  so  he  has  much  for  those  who  value  highly 
the  concentrated  presentment  of  passion,  who  appraise 


WORDSWORTH  51 

men  and  women  by  their  susceptibility  to  it,  and  art 
and  poetry  as  they  afford  the  spectacle  of  it.  Break- 
ing from  time  to  time  into  the  pensive  spectacle  of 
their  daily  toil,  their  occupations  near  to  nature, 
come  those  great  elementary  feelings,  lifting  and 
solemnising  their  language  and  giving  it  a  natural 
music.  The  great,  distinguishing  passion  came  to 
Michael  by  the  sheepfold,  to  Ruth  by  the  wayside, 
adding  these  humble  children  of  the  furrow  to  the 
true  aristocracy  of  passionate  souls.  In  this  respect, 
Wordsworth's  work  resembles  most  that  of  George 
Sand,  in  those  of  her  novels  which  depict  country 
life.  With  a  penetrative  pathos,  which  puts  him  in 
the  same  rank  with  the  masters  of  the  sentiment  of 
pity  in  literature,  with  Meinhold  and  Victor  Hugo, 
he  collects  all  the  traces  of  vivid  excitement  which 
were  to  be  found  in  that  pastoral  world — the  girl 
who  rung  her  father's  knell ;  the  unborn  infant  feel- 
ing about  its  mother's  heart ;  the  instinctive  touches 
of  children  ;  the  sorrows  of  the  wild  creatures,  even — 
their  home -sickness,  their  strange  yearnings ;  the 
tales  of  passionate  regret  that  hang  by  a  ruined 
farm-building,  a  heap  of  stones,  a  deserted  sheep- 
fold  ;  that  gay,  false,  adventurous,  outer  world, 
which  breaks  in  from  time  to  time  to  bewilder  and 
deflower  these  quiet  homes  ;  not  "  passionate  sorrow  " 
only,  for   the   overthrow    of  the    soul's   beauty,  but 


5  2  A  P  PRE  CIA  TIONS 

the  loss  of,  or  carelessness  for  personal  beauty  even, 
in  those  whom  men  have  wronged — their  pathetic 
wanness  ;  the  sailor  "  who,  in  his  heart,  was  half  a 
shepherd  on  the  stormy  seas";  the  wild  woman 
teaching  her  child  to  pray  for  her  betrayer  ;  incidents 
like  the  making  of  the  shepherd's  staff,  or  that  of  the 
young  boy  laying  the  first  stone  of  the  sheepfold  ; — 
all  the  pathetic  episodes  of  their  humble  existence, 
their  longing,  their  wonder  at  fortune,  their  poor 
pathetic  pleasures,  like  the  pleasures  of  children, 
won  so  hardly  in  the  struggle  for  bare  existence  ; 
their  yearning  towards  each  other,  in  their  darkened 
houses,  or  at  their  early  toil.  A  sort  of  biblical 
depth  and  solemnity  hangs  over  this  strange,  new, 
passionate,  pastoral  world,  of  which  he  first  raised 
the  image,  and  the  reflection  of  which  some  of  our 
best  modern  fiction  has  caught  from  him. 

He  pondered  much  over  the  philosophy  of  his 
poetry,  and  reading  deeply  in  the  history  of  his  own 
mind,  seems  at  times  to  have  passed  the  borders  of 
a  world  of  strange  speculations,  inconsistent  enough, 
had  he  cared  to  note  such  inconsistencies,  with  those 
traditional  beliefs,  which  were  otherwise  the  object  of 
his  devout  acceptance.  Thinking  of  the  high  value 
he  set  upon  customariness,  upon  all  that  is  habitual, 
local,  rooted  in  the  ground,  in   matters  of  religious 


WORDSWORTH  •  53 

sentiment,  you  might  sometimes  regard  him  as  one 
tethered  down  to  a  world,  refined  and  peaceful  indeed, 
but  with  no  broad  outlook,  a  world  protected,  but 
somewhat  narrowed,  by  the  influence  of  received  ideas. 
But  he  is  at  times  also  something  very  different  from 
this,  and  something  much  bolder.  A  chance  expres- 
sion is  overheard  and  placed  in  a  new  connexion, 
the  sudden  memory  of  a  thing  long  past  occurs  to 
him,  a  distant  object  is  relieved  for  a  while  by 
a  random  gleam  of  light — accidents  turning  up  for  a 
moment  what  lies  below  the  surface  of  our  immediate 
experience — and  he  passes  from  the  humble  graves 
and  lowly  arches  of  "  the  little  rock-like  pile  "  of  a 
Westmoreland  church,  on  bold  trains  of  speculative 
thought,  and  comes,  from  point  to  point,  into  strange 
contact  with  thoughts  which  have  visited,  from  time 
to  time,  far  more  venturesome,  perhaps  errant,  spirits. 
He  had  pondered  deeply,  for  instance,  on  those 
strange  reminiscences  and  forebodings,  which  seem  to 
make  our  lives  stretch  before  and  behind  us,  beyond 
where  we  can  see  or  touch  anything,  or  trace  the 
lines  of  connexion.  Following  the  soul,  backwards 
and  forwards,  on  these  endless  ways,  his  sense  of 
man's  dim,  potential  powers  became  a  pledge  to  him, 
indeed,  of  a  future  life,  but  carried  him  back  also  to 
that  mysterious  notion  of  an  earlier  state  of  exist- 
ence— the  fancy  of  the  Platonists — the  old  heresy  of 

E 


54  APPRECIATIONS 

Origen.  It  was  in  this  mood  that  he  conceived  those 
oft-reiterated  regrets  for  a  half-ideal  childhood,  when 
the  relics  of  Paradise  still  clung  about  the  soul — a 
childhood,  as  it  seemed,  full  of  the  fruits  of  old  age, 
lost  for  all,  in  a  degree,  in  the  passing  away  of  the 
youth  of  the  world,  lost  for  each  one,  over  again,  in 
the  passing  away  of  actual  youth.  It  is  this  ideal 
childhood  which  he  celebrates  in  his  famous  Ode  on 
tlie  Recollections  of  Childhood,  and  some  other  poems 
which  may  be  grouped  around  it,  such  as  the  lines  on 
Tintem  Abbey,  and  something  like  what  he  describes 
was  actually  truer  of  himself  than  he  seems  to  have 
understood  ;  for  his  own  most  delightful  poems  were 
really  the  instinctive  productions  of  earlier  life,  and 
most  surely  for  him,  "  the  first  diviner  influence  of 
this  world  "  passed  away,  more  and  more  completely, 
in  his  contact  with  experience. 

Sometimes  as  he  dwelt  upon  those  moments  of 
profound,  imaginative  power,  in  which  the  outward 
object  appears  to  take  colour  and  expression,  a  new 
nature  almost,  from  the  prompting  of  the  observant 
mind,  the  actual  world  would,  as  it  were,  dissolve  and 
detach  itself,  flake  by  flake,  and  he  himself  seemed 
to  be  the  creator,  and  when  he  would  the  destroyer, 
of  the  world  in  which  he  lived — that  old  isolating 
thought  of  many  a  brain-sick  mystic  of  ancient  and 
modern  times. 


WORDSWORTH  55 

At  other  times,  again,  in  those  periods  of  intense 
susceptibility,  in  which  he  appeared  to  himself  as  but 
the  passive  recipient  of  external  influences,  he  was 
attracted  by  the  thought  of  a  spirit  of  life  in  out- 
ward things,  a  single,  all-pervading  mind  in  them, 
of  which  man,  and  even  the  poet's  imaginative  energy, 
are  but  moments — that  old  dream  of  the  anima 
mundi,  the  mother  of  all  things  and  their  grave,  in 
which  some  had  desired  to  lose  themselves,  and  others 
had  become  indifferent  to  the  distinctions  of  good 
and  evil.  It  would  come,  sometimes,  like  the  sign  of 
the  macrocosm  to  Faust  in  his  cell  :  the  network  of 
man  and  nature  was  seen  to  be  pervaded  by  a 
common,  universal  life  :  a  new,  bold  thought  lifted 
him  above  the  furrow,  above  the  green  turf  of  the 
Westmoreland  churchyard,  to  a  world  altogether 
different  in  its  vagueness  and  vastness,  and  the 
narrow  glen  was  full  of  the  brooding  power  of  one 
universal  spirit. 

And  so  he  has  something,  also,  for  those  who  feel 
the  fascination  of  bold  speculative  ideas,  who  are 
really  capable  of  rising  upon  them  to  conditions  of 
poetical  thought.  He  uses  them,  indeed,  always  with 
a  very  fine  apprehension  of  the  limits  within  which 
alone  philosophical  imaginings  have  any  place  in  true 
poetry  ;  and  using  them  only  for  poetical  purposes, 


56  APPRECIATIONS 

is  not  too  careful  even  to  make  them  consistent 
with  each  other.  To  him,  theories  which  for  other 
men  bring  a  world  of  technical  diction,  brought 
perfect  form  and  expression,  as  in  those  two  lofty 
books  of  the  Prelude,  which  describe  the  decay  and 
the  restoration  of  Imagination  and  Taste.  Skirting 
the  borders  of  this  world  of  bewildering  heights  and 
depths,  he  got  but  the  first  exciting  influence  of 
it,  that  joyful  enthusiasm  which  great  imaginative 
theories  prompt,  when  the  mind  first  comes  to  have 
an  understanding  of  them  ;  and  it  is  not  under  the 
influence  of  these  thoughts  that  his  poetry  becomes 
tedious  or  loses  its  blitheness.  He  keeps  them,  too, 
always  within  certain  ethical  bounds,  so  that  no  word 
of  his  could  offend  the  simplest  of  those  simple  souls 
which  are  always  the  largest  portion  of  mankind.  But 
it  is,  nevertheless,  the  contact  of  these  thoughts,  the 
speculative  boldness  in  them,  which  constitutes,  at 
least  for  some  minds,  the  secret  attraction  of  much 
of  his  best  poetry — the  sudden  passage  from  lowly 
thoughts  and  places  to  the  majestic  forms  of  philo- 
sophical imagination,  the  play  of  these  forms  over  a 
world  so  different,  enlarging  so  strangely  the  bounds 
of  its  humble  churchyards,  and  breaking  such  a  wild 
light  on  the  graves  of  christened  children. 

And  these  moods  always  brought  with  them  fault- 
less expression.      In   regard    to  expression,  as  with 


WORDSWORTH  57 

feeling  and  thought,  the  duality  of  the  higher  and 
lower  moods  was  absolute.  It  belonged  to  the 
higher,  the  imaginative  mood,  and  was  the  pledge  of 
its  reality,  to  bring  the  appropriate  language  with  it. 
In  him,  when  the  really  poetical  motive  worked  at 
all,  it  united,  with  absolute  justice,  the  word  and  the 
idea  ;  each,  in  the  imaginative  flame,  becoming  in- 
separably one  with  the  other,  by  that  fusion  of  matter 
and  form,  which  is  the  characteristic  of  the  highest 
poetical  expression.  His  words  are  themselves 
thought  and  feeling ;  not  eloquent,  or  musical  words 
merely,  but  that  sort  of  creative  language  which 
carries  the  reality  of  what  it  depicts,  directly,  to  the 
consciousness. 

The  music  of  mere  metre  performs  but  a  limited, 
yet  a  very  peculiar  and  subtly  ascertained  function, 
in  Wordsworth's  poetry.  With  him,  metre  is  but  an 
additional  grace,  accessory  to  that  deeper  music  of 
words  and  sounds,  that  moving  power,  which  they 
exercise  in  the  nobler  prose  no  less  than  in  formal 
poetry.  It  is  a  sedative  to  that  excitement,  an 
excitement  sometimes  almost  painful,  under  which 
the  language,  alike  of  poetry  and  prose,  attains 
a  rhythmical  power,  independent  of  metrical  com- 
bination, and  dependent  rather  on  some  subtle 
adjustment  of  the  elementary  sounds  of  words  them- 
selves to  the  image  or  feeling   they  convey.      Yet 


58  APPRECIATIONS 

some  of  his  pieces,  pieces  prompted  by  a  sort  of 
half-playful  mysticism,  like  the  Daffodils  and  The 
Two  April  Mornings,  are  distinguished  by  a  certain 
quaint  gaiety  of  metre,  and  rival  by  their  perfect 
execution,  in  this  respect,  similar  pieces  among  our 
own  Elizabethan,  or  contemporary  French  poetry. 
And  those  who  take  up  these  poems  after  an  interval, 
of  months,  or  years  perhaps,  may  be  surprised  at 
finding  how  well  old  favourites  wear,  how  their 
strange,  inventive  turns  of  diction  or  thought  still 
send  through  them  the  old  feeling  of  surprise.  Those 
who  lived  about  Wordsworth  were  all  great  lovers 
of  the  older  English  literature,  and  oftentimes  there 
came  out  in  him  a  noticeable  likeness  to  our  earlier 
poets.  He  quotes  unconsciously,  but  with  new  power 
of  meaning,  a  clause  from  one  of  Shakespeare's  son- 
nets ;  and,  as  with  some  other  men's  most  famous 
work,  the  Ode  on  the  Recollections  of  Childhood  had 
its  anticipator.*  He  drew  something  too  from  the 
unconscious  mysticism  of  the  old  English  language 
itself,  drawing  out  the  inward  significance  of  its 
racy  idiom,  and  the  not  wholly  unconscious  poetry 
of  the  language  used  by  the  simplest  people  under 
strong  excitement — language,  therefore,  at  its  origin. 

The  office  of  the  poet  is  not  that  of  the  moralist, 

*  Henry  Vaughan,  in  The  Retreat. 


WORDSWORTH  59 

and  the  first  aim  of  Wordsworth's  poetry  is  to  give 
the  reader  a  peculiar  kind  of  pleasure.  But  through 
his  poetry,  and  through  this  pleasure  in  it,  he  does 
actually  convey  to  the  reader  an  extraordinary 
wisdom  in  the  things  of  practice.  One  lesson,  if 
men  must  have  lessons,  he  conveys  more  clearly 
-than  all,  the  supreme  importance  of  contemplation 
in  the  conduct  of  life. 

Contemplation  —  impassioned  contemplation  — 
that,  is  with  Wordsworth  the  end-in-itself,  the  perfect 
end.  We  see  the  majority  of  mankind  going  most 
often  to  definite  ends,  lower  or  higher  ends,  as  their 
own  instincts  may  determine ;  but  the  end  may 
never  be  attained,  and  the  means  not  be  quite  the 
right  means,  great  ends  and  little  ones  alike  being, 
for  the  most  part,  distant,  and  the  ways  to  them,  in 
this  dim  world,  somewhat  vague.  Meantime,  to 
higher  or  lower  ends,  they  move  too  often  with 
something  of  a  sad  countenance,  with  hurried  and 
ignoble  gait,  becoming,  unconsciously,  something  like 
thorns,  in  their  anxiety  to  bear  grapes ;  it  being 
possible  for  people,  in  the  pursuit  of  even  great  ends, 
to  become  themselves  thin  and  impoverished  in  spirit 
and  temper,  thus  diminishing  the  sum  of  perfection 
in  the  world,  at  its  very  sources.  We  understand 
this  when  it  is  a  question  of  mean,  or  of  intensely 
selfish  ends — of  Grandet,  or  Javert.     We  think  it  bad 


60  APPRECIATIONS 

morality  to  say  that  the  end  justifies  the  means, 
and  we  know  how  false  to  all  higher  conceptions  of 
the  religious  life  is  the  type  of  one  who  is  ready  to 
do  evil  that  good  may  come.  We  contrast  with  such 
dark,  mistaken  eagerness,  a  type  like  that  of  Saint 
Catherine  of  Siena,  who  made  the  means  to  her  ends 
so  attractive,  that  she  has  won  for  herself  an  undying 
place  in  the  House  Beautiful,  not  by  her  rectitude 
of  soul  only,  but  by  its  "  fairness  " — by  those  quite 
different  qualities  which  commend  themselves  to  the 
poet  and  the  artist. 

Yet,  for  most  of  us,  the  conception  of  means  and 
ends  covers  the  whole  of  life,  and  is  the  exclusive 
type  or  figure  under  which  we  represent  our  lives  to 
ourselves.  Such  a  figure,  reducing  all  things  to 
machinery,  though  it  has  on  its  side  the  authority  of 
that  old  Greek  moralist  who  has  fixed  for  succeeding 
generations  the  outline  of  the  theory  of  right  living, 
is  too  like  a  mere  picture  or  description  of  men's  lives 
as  we  actually  find  them,  to  be  the  basis  of  the  higher 
ethics.  It  covers  the  meanness  of  men's  daily  lives, 
and  much  of  the  dexterity  and  the  vigour  with  which 
they  pursue  what  may  seem  to  them  the  good  of 
themselves  or  of  others  ;  but  not  ]  the  intangible 
perfection  of  those  whose  ideal  is  rather  in  being  than 
in  doing — not  those  manners  which  are,  in  the  deepest 
as  in  the  simplest  sense,  morals,  and  without  which 


WORDSWORTH  61 

one  cannot  so  much  as  offer  a  cup  of  water  to  a  poor 
man  without  offence — not  the  part  of  "  antique 
Rachel,"  sitting  in  the  company  of  Beatrice  ;  and 
even  the  moralist  might  well  endeavour  rather  to 
withdraw  men  from  the  too  exclusive  consideration 
of  means  and  ends,  in  life. 

Against  this  predominance  of  machinery  in  our 
existence,  Wordsworth's  poetry,  like  all  great  art  and 
poetry,  is  a  continual  protest.  Justify  rather  the  end 
by  the  means,  it  seems  to  say  :  whatever  may  become 
of  the  fruit,  make  sure  of  the  flowers  and  the  leaves. 
It  was  justly  said,  therefore,  by  one  who  had  meditated 
very  profoundly  on  the  true  relation  of  means  to 
ends  in  life,  and  on  the  distinction  between  what  is 
desirable  in  itself  and  what  is  desirable  only  as 
machinery,  that  when  the  battle  which  he  and  his 
friends  were  waging  had  been  won,  the  world  would 
need  more  than  ever  those  qualities  which  Words- 
worth was  keeping  alive  and  nourishing* 

That  the  end  of  life  is  not  action  but  contem- 
plation— being  as  distinct  from  doing — a  certain 
disposition  of  the  mind  :  is,  in  some  shape  or  other, 
the  principle  of  all  the  higher  morality.  In  poetry, 
in  art,  if  you  enter  into  their  true  spirit  at  all,  you 
touch  this  principle,  in  a  measure  :   these,  by  their 

*  See  an  interesting  paper,  by  Mr.  John  Morley,  on  "  The  Death  of 
Mr.  Mill,"  Fortnightly  Review,  June  1873. 


62  APPRECIATIONS 

very  sterility,  are  a  type  of  beholding  for  the  mere 
joy  of  beholding.  To  treat  life  in  the  spirit  of  art,  is 
to  make  life  a  thing  in  which  means  and  ends  are 
identified :  to  encourage  such  treatment,  the  true 
moral  significance  of  art  and  poetry.  Wordsworth, 
and  other  poets  who  have  been  like  him  in  ancient  or 
more  recent  times,  are  the  masters,  the  experts,  in  this 
art  of  impassioned  contemplation.  Their  work  is,  not 
to  teach  lessons,  or  enforce  rules,  or  even  to  stimulate 
us  to  noble  ends  ;  but  to  withdraw  the  thoughts  for 
a  little  while  from  the  mere  machinery  of  life,  to  fix 
them,  with  appropriate  emotions,  on  the  spectacle  of 
those  great  facts  in  man's  existence  which  no  ma- 
chinery affects,  "on  the  great  and  universal  passions 
of  men,  the  most  general  and  interesting  of  their 
occupations,  and  the  entire  world  of  nature," — on 
"  the  operations  of  the  elements  and  the  appearances 
of  the  visible  universe,  on  storm  and  sunshine,  on 
the  revolutions  of  the  seasons,  on  cold  and  heat,  on 
loss  of  friends  and  kindred,  on  injuries  and  resent- 
ments, on  gratitude  and  hope,  on  fear  and  sorrow." 
To  witness  this  spectacle  with  appropriate  emotions 
is  the  aim  of  all  culture ;  and  of  these  emotions 
poetry  like  Wordsworth's  is  a  great  nourisher 
and  stimulant.  He  sees  nature  full  of  sentiment 
and  excitement ;  he  sees  men  and  women  as 
parts     of    nature,    passionate,    excited,    in     strange 


WORDS  IVOR  TH  63 

grouping  and  connexion  with  the  grandeur  and 
beauty  of  the  natural  world  : — images,  in  his  own 
words,  "of  man  suffering,  amid  awful  forms  and 
powers." 

Such  is  the  figure  of  the  more  powerful  and  ori- 
ginal poet,  hidden  away,  in  part,  under  those  weaker 
elements  in  Wordsworth's  poetry,  which  for  some 
minds  determine  their  entire  character  ;  a  poet  some- 
what bolder  and  more  passionate  than  might  at  first 
sight  be  supposed,  but  not  too  bold  for  true  poetical 
taste ;  an  unimpassioned  writer,  you  might  some- 
times fancy,  yet  thinking  the  chief  aim,  in  life  and 
art  alike,  to  be  a  certain  deep  emotion  ;  seeking 
most  often  the  great  elementary  passions  in  lowly 
places  ;  having  at  least  this  condition  of  all  impas- 
sioned work,  that  he  aims  always  at  an  absolute 
sincerity  of  feeling  and  diction,  so  that  he  is  the 
true  forerunner  of  the  deepest  and  most  passionate 
poetry  of  our  own  day  ;  yet  going  back  also,  with 
something  of  a  protest  against  the  conventional  fer- 
vour of  much  of  the  poetry  popular  in  his  own  time, 
to  those  older  English  poets,  whose  unconscious  like- 
ness often  comes  out  in  him. 


1874. 


COLERIDGE* 

Forms  of  intellectual  and  spiritual  culture  sometimes 
exercise  their  subtlest  and  most  artful  charm  when 
life  is  already  passing  from  them.  Searching  and 
irresistible  as  are  the  changes  of  the  human  spirit  on 
its  way  to  perfection,  there  is  yet  so  much  elasticity 
of  temper  that  what  must  pass  away  sooner  or  later 
is  not  disengaged  all  at  once,  even  from  the  highest 
order  of  minds.  Nature,  which  by  one  law  of  de- 
velopment evolves  ideas,  hypotheses,  modes  of  inward 
life,  and  represses  them  in  turn,  has  in  this  way  pro- 
vided that  the  earlier  growth  should  propel  its  fibres 
into  the  later,  and  so  transmit  the  whole  of  its  forces 
in  an  unbroken  continuity  of  life.  Then  comes  the 
spectacle  of  the  reserve  of  the  elder  generation  ex- 
quisitely refined  by  the  antagonism  of  the  new. 
That  current  of  new  life  chastens  them  while  they 
contend  against  it.      Weaker  minds  fail  to  perceive 

*  The  latter  part  of  this  paper,  like  that  on  Dante  Gabriel  Rossetti, 
was  contributed  to  Mr.  T.  H.  Ward's  English  Poets. 


COLERIDGE  65 

the  change :  the  clearest  minds  abandon  themselves 
to  it.  To  feel  the  change  everywhere,  yet  not 
abandon  oneself  to  it,  is  a  situation  of  difficulty  and 
contention.  Communicating,  in  this  way,  to  the 
passing  stage  of  culture,  the  charm  of  what  is 
chastened,  high-strung,  athletic,  they  yet  detach  the 
highest  minds  from  the  past,  by  pressing  home  its 
difficulties  and  finally  proving  it  impossible.  Such 
has  been  the  charm  of  many  leaders  of  lost  causes  in 
philosophy  and  in  religion.  It  is  the  special  charm 
of  Coleridge,  in  connexion  with  those  older  methods 
of  philosophic  inquiry,  over  which  the  empirical 
philosophy  of  our  day  has  triumphed. 

Modern  thought  is  distinguished  from  ancient  by 
its  cultivation  of  the  "  relative  "  spirit  in  place  of  the 
"  absolute."  Ancient  philosophy  sought  to  arrest 
every  object  in  an  eternal  outline,  to  fix  thought  in 
a  necessary  formula,  and  the  varieties  of  life  in  a 
classification  by  "  kinds,"  or  genera.  To  the  modern 
spirit  nothing  is,  or  can  be  rightly  known,  except 
relatively  and  under  conditions.  The  philosophical 
conception  of  the  relative  has  been  developed  in 
modern  times  through  the  influence  of  the  sciences  of 
observation.  Those  sciences  reveal  types  of  life 
evanescing  into  each  other  by  inexpressible  refine- 
ments of  change.  Things  pass  into  their  opposites 
by   accumulation    of    undefinable    quantities.      The 


66  APPRECIA  TIONS 

growth  of  those  sciences  consists  in  a  continual 
analysis  of  facts  of  rough  and  general  observation 
into  groups  of  facts  more  precise  and  minute.  The 
faculty  for  truth  is  recognised  as  a  power  of  distin- 
guishing and  fixing  delicate  and  fugitive  detail.  The 
moral  world  is  ever  in  contact  with  the  physical,  and 
the  relative  spirit  has  invaded  moral  philosophy  from 
the  ground  of  the  inductive  sciences.  There  it  has 
started  a  new  analysis  of  the  relations  of  body  and 
mind,  good  and  evil,  freedom  and  necessity.  Hard 
and  abstract  moralities  are  yielding  to  a  more  exact 
estimate  of  the  subtlety  and  complexity  of  our  life. 
Always,  as  an  organism  increases  in  perfection,  the 
conditions  of  its  life  become  more  complex.  Man  is 
the  most  complex  of  the  products  of  nature.  Char- 
acter merges  into  temperament :  the  nervous  system 
refines  itself  into  intellect.  Man's  physical  organism 
is  played  upon  not  only  by  the  physical  conditions 
about  it,  but  by  remote  laws  of  inheritance,  the 
vibration  of  long-past  acts  reaching  him  in  the  midst 
of  the  new  order  of  things  in  which  he  lives.  When 
we  have  estimated  these  conditions  he  is  still  not  yet 
simple  and  isolated  ;  for  the  mind  of  the  race,  the 
character  of  the  age,  sway  him  this  way  or  that 
through  the  medium  of  language  and  current  ideas. 
It  seems  as  if  the  most  opposite  statements  about 
him  were  alike  true :  he  is  so  receptive,  all  the  influ- 


COLERIDGE  67 

ences  of  nature  and  of  society  ceaselessly  playing 
upon  him,  so  that  every  hour  in  his  life  is  unique, 
changed  altogether  by  a  stray  word,  or  glance,  or 
touch.  It  is  the  truth  of  these  relations  that  experi- 
ence gives  us,  not  the  truth  of  eternal  outlines 
ascertained  once  for  all,  but  a  world  of  fine  grada- 
tions and  subtly  linked  conditions,  shifting  intricately 
as  we  ourselves  change — and  bids  us,  by  a  constant 
clearing  of  the  organs  of  observation  and  perfecting 
of  analysis,  to  make  what  we  can  of  these.  To  the 
intellect,  the  critical  spirit,  just  these  subtleties  of 
effect  are  more  precious  than  anything  else.  What 
is  lost  in  precision  of  form  is  gained  in  intricacy  of 
expression.  It  is  no  vague  scholastic  abstraction 
that  will  satisfy  the  speculative  instinct  in  our 
modern  minds.  Who  would  change  the  colour  or 
curve  of  a  rose-leaf  for  that  ovcrla  d^pc6fiaro<i,  aa^q- 
fiana-Tos,  ava(f>r)<; — that  colourless,  formless,  intangible, 
being — Plato  put  so  high?  For  the  true  illustration  of 
the  speculative  temper  is  not  the  Hindoo  mystic,  lost 
to  sense,  understanding,  individuality,  but  one  such 
as  Goethe,  to  whom  every  moment  of  life  brought 
its  contribution  of  experimental,  individual  know- 
ledge ;  by  whom  no  touch  of  the  world  of  form, 
colour,  and  passion  was  disregarded. 

Now  the  literary  life  of  Coleridge  was  a  disinter- 
ested  struggle  against  the  relative  spirit.      With   a 


68  APPRECIA  TIONS 

strong  native  bent  towards  the  tracking  of  all  ques- 
tions, critical  or  practical,  to  first  principles,  he  is  ever 
restlessly  scheming  to  "  apprehend  the  absolute,"  to 
affirm  it  effectively,  to  get  it  acknowledged.  It  was 
an  effort,  surely,  an  effort  of  sickly  thought,  that 
saddened  his  mind,  and  limited  the  operation  of  his 
unique  poetic  gift. 

So  what  the  reader  of  our  own  generation  will 
least  find  in  Coleridge's  prose  writings  is  the  excite- 
ment of  the  literary  sense.  And  yet,  in  those  grey 
volumes,  we  have  the  larger  part  of  the  production 
of  one  who  made  way  ever  by  a  charm,  the  charm 
of  voice,  of  aspect,  of  language,  above  all  by  the 
intellectual  charm  of  new,  moving,  luminous  ideas. 
Perhaps  the  chief  offence  in  Coleridge  is  an  excess 
of  seriousness,  a  seriousness  arising  not  from  any 
moral  principle,  but  from  a  misconception  of  the 
perfect  manner.  There  is  a  certain  shade  of  uncon- 
cern, the  perfect  manner  of  the  eighteenth  century, 
which  may  be  thought  to  mark  complete  culture  in 
the  handling  of  abstract  questions.  The  humanist, 
the  possessor  of  that  complete  culture,  does  not 
"  weep  "  over  the  failure  of  "  a  theory  of  the  quantifi- 
cation of  the  predicate,"  nor  "  shriek  "  over  the  fall  of 
a  philosophical  formula.  A  kind  of  humour  is,  in 
truth,  one  of  the  conditions  of  the  just  mental  atti- 
tude, in  the  criticism  of  by-past  stages  of  thought. 


COLERIDGE  69 

Humanity  cannot  afford  to  be  too  serious  about 
them,  any  more  than  a  man  of  good  sense  can  afford 
to  be  too  serious  in  looking  back  upon  his  own 
childhood.  Plato,  whom  Coleridge  claims  as  the 
first  of  his  spiritual  ancestors,  Plato,  as  we  remember 
him,  a  true  humanist,  holds  his  theories  lightly,  glances 
with  a  somewhat  blithe  and  naive  inconsequence 
from  one  view  to  another,  not  anticipating  the  burden 
of  importance  "  views  "  will  one  day  have  for  men. 
In  reading  him  one  feels  how  lately  it  was  that 
Crcesus  thought  it  a  paradox  to  say  that  external 
prosperity  was  not  necessarily  happiness.  But  on 
Coleridge  lies  the  whole  weight  of  the  sad  reflection 
that  has  since  come  into  the  world,  with  which  for 
us  the  air  is  full,  which  the  "  children  in  the  market- 
place "  repeat  to  each  other.  His  very  language  is 
forced  and  broken  lest  some  saving  formula  should 
be  lost — distinctities,  enucleation,  pentad  of  operative 
Christianity  ;  he  has  a  whole  armoury  of  these  terms, 
and  expects  to  turn  the  tide  of  human  thought  by 
fixing  the  sense  of  such  expressions  as  "  reason," 
"  understanding,"  "  idea."  Again,  he  lacks  the 
jealousy  of  a  true  artist  in  excluding  all  associations 
that  have  no  colour,  or  charm,  or  gladness  in  them  ; 
and  everywhere  allows  the  impress  of  a  somewhat 
inferior  theological  literature. 

"  I  was    driven  from    life  in    motion  to    life    in 
F 


7o  APPRECIATIONS 

thought  and  sensation  : "  so  Coleridge  sums  up  his 
childhood,  with  its  delicacy,  its  sensitiveness,  and 
passion.  But  at  twenty -five  he  was  exercising  a 
wonderful  charm,  and  had  already  defined  for  himself 
his  peculiar  line  of  intellectual  activity.  He  had  an 
odd,  attractive  gift  of  conversation,  or  rather  of 
monologue,  as  Madame  de  Stael  observed  of  him, 
full  of  bizarreries,  with  the  rapid  alternations  of  a 
dream,  and  here  or  there  an  unexpected  summons 
into  a  world  strange  to  the  hearer,  abounding  in 
images  drawn  from  a  sort  of  divided  imperfect  life, 
the  consciousness  of  the  opium-eater,  as  of  one  to 
whom  the  external  world  penetrated  only  in  part, 
and,  blent  with  all  this,  passages  of  deep  obscurity, 
precious,  if  at  all,  only  for  their  musical  cadence, 
echoes  in  Coleridge  of  the  eloquence  of  those  older 
English  writers  of  whom  he  was  so  ardent  a  lover. 
And  all  through  this  brilliant  early  manhood  we 
may  discern  the  power  of  the  "  Asiatic  "  temperament, 
of  that  voluptuousness,  which  is  connected  perhaps 
with  his  appreciation  of  the  intimacy,  the  almost 
mystical  communion  of  touch,  between  nature  and 
man.  "  I  am  much  better,"  he  writes,  "  and  my  new 
and  tender  health  is  all  over  me  like  a  voluptuous 
feeling."  And  whatever  fame,  or  charm,  or  life- 
inspiring  gift  he  has  had  as  a  speculative  thinker, 
is  the  vibration  of  the  interest  he  excited  then,  the 


COLERIDGE  71 

propulsion  into  years  which  clouded  his  early  promise 
of  that  first  buoyant,  irresistible,  self-assertion.  So 
great  is  even  the  indirect  power  of  a  sincere  effort 
towards  the  ideal  life,  of  even  a  temporary  escape  of 
the  spirit  from  routine. 

In  1798  he  visited  Germany,  then,  the  only  half- 
known,  "promised  land,"  of  the  metaphysical,  the 
"  absolute,"  philosophy.  A  beautiful  fragment  of 
this  period  remains,  describing  a  spring  excursion  to 
the  Brocken.  His  excitement  still  vibrates  in  it. 
Love,  all  joyful  states  of  mind,  are  self-expressive : 
they  loosen  the  tongue,  they  fill  the  thoughts  with 
sensuous  images,  they  harmonise  one  with  the  world 
of  sight.  We  hear  of  the  "rich  graciousness  and 
courtesy "  of  Coleridge's  manner,  of  the  white  and 
delicate  skin,  the  abundant  black  hair,  the  full,  almost 
animal  lips — that  whole  physiognomy  of  the  dreamer, 
already  touched  with  narcotism.  One  says,  of  the 
beginning  of  one  of  his  Unitarian  sermons  :  "  His 
voice  rose  like  a  stream  of  rich,  distilled  perfumes  ; " 
another,  *  He  talks  like  an  angel,  and  does — 
nothing ! " 

The  Aids  to  Reflection,  The  Friend,  The  Bio- 
graphia  Literaria :  those  books  came  from  one 
whose  vocation  was  in  the  world  of  the  imagina- 
tion, the  theory  and  practice  of  poetry.  And  yet, 
perhaps,  of  all  books  that  have  been  influential  in 


72  APPRECIATIONS 

modern  times,  they  are  furthest  from  artistic  form — 
bundles  of  notes  ;  the  original  matter  inseparably- 
mixed  up  with  that  borrowed  from  others ;  the 
whole,  just  that  mere  preparation  for  an  artistic 
effect  which  the  finished  literary  artist  would  be 
careful  one  day  to  destroy.  Here,  again,  we  have 
a  trait  profoundly  characteristic  of  Coleridge.  He 
sometimes  attempts  to  reduce  a  phase  of  thought, 
subtle  and  exquisite,  to  conditions  too  rough  for  it. 
He  uses  a  purely  speculative  gift  for  direct  moral 
edification.  Scientific  truth  is  a  thing  fugitive, 
relative,  full  of  fine  gradations  :  he  tries  to  fix  it  in 
absolute  formulas.  The  Aids  to  Reflection,  The 
Friend,  are  efforts  to  propagate  the  volatile  spirit  of 
conversation  into  the  less  ethereal  fabric  of  a  written 
book  ;  and  it  is  only  here  or  there  that  the  poorer 
matter  becomes  vibrant,  is  really  lifted  by  the  spirit. 
De  Quincey  said  of  him  that  "  he  wanted  better 
bread  than  can  be  made  with  wheat : "  Lamb,  that 
from  childhood  he  had  "hungered  for  eternity." 
Yet  the  faintness,  the  continuous  dissolution,  what- 
ever its  cause,  which  soon  supplanted  the  buoyancy 
of  his  first  wonderful  years,  had  its  own  consumptive 
refinements,  and  even  brought,  as  to  the  "  Beautiful 
Soul "  in  Wilhelm  Meister,  a  faint  religious  ecstasy — 
that  "  singing  in  the  sails  "  which  is  not  of  the  breeze. 
Here  again  is  one  of  his  occasional  notes  : — 


COLERIDGE  73 

"  In  looking  at  objects  of  nature  while  I  am 
thinking,  as  at  yonder  moon,  dim-glimmering  through 
the  window-pane,  I  seem  rather  to  be  seeking,  as  it 
were  asking,  a  symbolical  language  for  something 
within  me,  that  already  and  for  ever  exists,  than 
observing  anything  new.  Even  when  the  latter  is 
the  case,  yet  still  I  have  always  an  obscure  feeling, 
as  if  that  new  phenomenon  were  the  dim  awaking 
of  a  forgotten  or  hidden  truth  of  my  inner  nature. 
While  I  was  preparing  the  pen  to  make  this  remark, 
I  lost  the  train  of  thought  which  had  led  me  to  it." 

What  a  distemper  of  the  eye  of  the  mind  !  What 
an  almost  bodily  distemper  there  is  in  that ! 

Coleridge's  intellectual  sorrows  were  many  ;  but 
he  had  one  singular  intellectual  happiness.  With 
an  inborn  taste  for  transcendental  philosophy,  he 
lived  just  at  the  time  when  that  philosophy  took  an 
immense  spring  in  Germany,  and  connected  itself 
with  an  impressive  literary  movement.  He  had  the 
good  luck  to  light  upon  it  in  its  freshness,  and  intro- 
duce it  to  his  countrymen.  What  an  opportunity 
for  one  reared  on  the  colourless  analytic  English 
philosophies  of  the  last  century,  but  who  feels  an 
irresistible  attraction  towards  bold  metaphysical 
synthesis  !  How  rare  are  such  occasions  of  intel- 
lectual contentment !  This  transcendental  philosophy, 
chiefly  as  systematised  by  the  mystic  Schelling,  Cole- 


74    •  APPRECIATIONS 

ridge  applied  with  an  eager,  unwearied  subtlety,  to  the 
questions  of  theology,  and  poetic  or  artistic  criticism. 
It  is  in  his  theory  of  poetry,  of  art,  that  he  comes 
nearest  to  principles  of  permanent  truth  and  import- 
ance :  that  is  the  least  fugitive  part  of  his  prose 
work.  What,  then,  is  the  essence  of  his  philosophy 
of  art — of  imaginative  production  ? 

Generally,  it  may  be  described  as  an  attempt  to 
reclaim  the  world  of  art  as  a  world  of  fixed  laws,  to 
show  that  the  creative  activity  of  genius  and  the 
simplest  act  of  thought  are  but  higher  and  lower 
products  of  the  laws  of  a  universal  logic.  Criticism, 
feeling  its  own  inadequacy  in  dealing  with  the  greater 
works  of  art,  is  sometimes  tempted  to  make  too  much 
of  those  dark  and  capricious  suggestions  of  genius, 
which  even  the  intellect  possessed  by  them  is  unable 
to  explain  or  recall.  It  has  seemed  due  to  the  half- 
sacred  character  of  those  works  to  ignore  all  analogy 
between  the  productive  process  by  which  they  had 
their  birth,  and  the  simpler  processes  of  mind. 
Coleridge,  on  the  other  hand,  assumes  that  the 
highest  phases  of  thought  must  be  more,  not  less, 
than  the  lower,  subject  to  law. 

With  this  interest,  in  the  Biographia  Literaria, 
he  refines  Schilling's  "  Philosophy  of  Nature  "  into  a 
theory  of  art.  "  There  can  be  no  plagiarism  in 
philosophy,"  says  Heine  : — Es  giebt  kein  Plagiat  in 


COLERIDGE  75 

der  Philosophie,  in  reference  to  the  charge  brought 
against  Schelling  of  unacknowledged  borrowing  from 
Bruno ;  and  certainly  that  which  is  common  to 
Coleridge  and  Schelling  and  Bruno  alike  is  of  far 
earlier  origin  than  any  of  them.  Schellingism,  the 
"  Philosophy  of  Nature,"  is  indeed  a  constant  tradi- 
tion in  the  history  of  thought :  it  embodies  a  per- 
manent type  of  the  speculative  temper.  That  mode 
of  conceiving  nature  as  a  mirror  or  reflex  of  the 
intelligence  of  man  may  be  traced  up  to  the  first 
beginnings  of  Greek  speculation.  There  are  two 
ways  of  envisaging  those  aspects  of  nature  which 
seem  to  bear  the  impress  of  reason  or  intelligence. 
There  is  the  deist's  way,  which  regards  them  merely 
as  marks  of  design,  which  separates  the  informing 
mind  from  its  result  in  nature,  as  the  mechanist  from 
the  machine  ;  and  there  is  the  pantheistic  way,  which 
identifies  the  two,  which  regards  nature  itself  as  the 
living  energy  of  an  intelligence  of  the  same  kind  as 
though  vaster  in  scope  than  the  human.  Partly 
through  the  influence  of  mythology,  the  Greek  mind 
became  early  possessed  with  the  conception  of  nature  as 
living,  thinking,  almost  speaking  to  the  mind  of  man. 
This  unfixed  poetical  prepossession,  reduced  to  an 
abstract  form,  petrified  into  an  idea,  is  the  force 
which  gives  unity  of  aim  to  Greek  philosophy. 
Little  by  little,  it  works  out  the  substance  of  the 


76  APPRECIATIONS 

Hegelian  formula :  "  Whatever  is,  is  according  to 
reason  :  whatever  is  according  to  reason,  that  is." 
Experience,  which  has  gradually  saddened  the  earth's 
colours  for  us,  stiffened  its  motions,  withdrawn  from  it 
some  blithe  and  debonair  presence,  has  quite  changed 
the  character  of  the  science  of  nature,  as  we  under- 
stand it.  The  "  positive  "  method,  in  truth,  makes 
very  little  account  of  marks  of  intelligence  in 
nature  :  in  its  wider  view  of  phenomena,  it  sees  that 
those  instances  are  a  minority,  and  may  rank  as  happy 
coincidences  :  it  absorbs  them  in  the  larger  concep- 
tion of  universal  mechanical  law.  But  the  suspicion 
of  a  mind  latent  in  nature,  struggling  for  release,  and 
intercourse  with  the  intellect  of  man  through  true 
ideas,  has  never  ceased  to  haunt  a  certain  class  of 
minds.  Started  again  and  again  in  successive  periods 
by  enthusiasts  on  the  antique  pattern,  in  each  case 
the  thought  may  have  seemed  paler  and  more  fan- 
tastic amid  the  growing  consistency  and  sharpness 
of  outline  of  other  and  more  positive  forms  of  know- 
ledge. Still,  wherever  the  speculative  instinct  has 
been  united  with  a  certain  poetic  inwardness  of 
temperament,  as  in  Bruno,  in  Schelling,  there  that 
old  Greek  conception,  like  some  seed  floating  in  the 
air,  has  taken  root  and  sprung  up  anew.  Coleridge, 
thrust  inward  upon  himself,  driven  from  "  life  in 
thought  and  sensation  "  to  life  in  thought  only,  feels 


COLERIDGE  77 

already,  in  his  dark  London  school,  a  thread  of  the 
Greek  mind  on  this  matter  vibrating  strongly  in 
him.  At  fifteen  he  is  discoursing  on  Plotinus,  as  in 
later  years  he  reflects  from  Schelling  that  flitting 
intellectual  tradition.  He  supposes  a  subtle,  sym- 
pathetic co-ordination  between  the  ideas  of  the  human 
reason  and  the  laws  of  the  natural  world.  Science, 
the  real  knowledge  of  that  natural  world,  is  to  be 
attained,  not  by  observation,  experiment,  analysis, 
patient  generalisation,  but  by  the  evolution  or  re- 
covery of  those  ideas  directly  from  within,  by  a  sort 
of  Platonic  "  recollection  " ;  every  group  of  observed 
facts  remaining  an  enigma  until  the  appropriate  idea 
is  struck  upon  them  from  the  mind  of  a  Newton,  or 
a  Cuvier,  the  genius  in  whom  sympathy  with  the 
universal  reason  becomes  entire.  In  the  next  place, 
he  Conceives  that  this  reason  or  intelligence  in  nature 
becomes  reflective,  or  self-conscious.  He  fancies  he 
can  trace,  through  all  the  simpler  forms  of  life, 
fragments  of  an  eloquent  prophecy  about  the  human 
mind.  The  whole  of  nature  he  regards  as  a  develop- 
ment of  higher  forms  out  of  the  lower,  through  shade 
after  shade  of  systematic  change.  The  dim  stir  of 
chemical  atoms  towards  the  axis  of  crystal  form,  the 
trance -like  life  of  plants,  the  animal  troubled  by 
strange  irritabilities,  are  stages  which  anticipate 
consciousness.       All     through     the    ever-increasing 


78  APPRECIATIONS 

movement  of  life  that  was  shaping  itself;  every 
successive  phase  of  life,  in  its  unsatisfied  suscepti- 
bilities, seeming  to  be  drawn  out  of  its-  own  limits 
by  the  more  pronounced  current  of  life  on  its  con- 
fines, the  "shadow  of  approaching  humanity"  gradually 
deepening,  the  latent  intelligence  winning  a  way  to 
the  surface.  And  at  this  point  the  law  of  develop- 
ment does  not  lose  itself  in  caprice  :  rather  it  becomes 
more  constraining  and  incisive.  From  the  lowest  to 
the  very  highest  acts  of  the  conscious  intelligence, 
there  is  another  series  of  refining  shades.  Gradually 
the  mind  concentrates  itself,  frees  itself  from  the 
limitations  of  the  particular,  the  individual,  attains 
a  strange  power  of  modifying  and  centralising  what 
it  receives  from  without,  according  to  the  pattern  of 
an  inward  ideal.  At  last,  in  imaginative  genius, 
ideas  become  effective  :  the  intelligence  of  nature, 
all  its  discursive  elements  now  connected  and  justi- 
fied, is  clearly  reflected  ;  the  interpretation  of  its 
latent  purposes  being  embodied  in  the  great  central 
products  of  creative  art.  The  secret  of  creative 
genius  would  be  an  exquisitely  purged  sympathy 
with  nature,  with  the  reasonable  soul  antecedent 
there.  Those  associative  conceptions  of  the  imagina- 
tion, those  eternally  fixed  types  of  action  and  passion, 
would  come,  not  so  much  from  the  conscious  inven- 
tion of  the  artist,  as  from  his  self-surrender  to  the 


COLERIDGE  79 

suggestions  of  an  abstract  reason  or  ideality  in  things  : 
they  would  be  evolved  by  the  stir  of  nature  itself, 
realising  the  highest  reach  of  its  dormant  reason  : 
they  would  have  a  kind  of  prevenient  necessity  to 
rise  at  some  time  to  the  surface  of  the  human  mind. 
It  is  natural  that  Shakespeare  should  be  the 
favourite  illustration  of  such  criticism,  whether 
in  England  or  Germany.  The  first  suggestion 
in  Shakespeare  is  that  of  capricious  detail,  of  a  way- 
wardness that  plays  with  the  parts  careless  of  the 
impression  of  the  whole ;  what  supervenes  is  the 
constraining  unity  of  effect,  the  ineffaceable  impression, 
of  Hamlet  or  Macbeth.  His  hand  moving  freely  is 
curved  round  as  if  by  some  law  of  gravitation  from 
within  :  an  energetic  unity  or  identity  makes  itself 
visible  amid  an  abounding  variety.  This  unity  or 
identity  Coleridge  exaggerates  into  something  like 
the  identity  of  a  natural  organism,  and  the  associative 
act  which  effected  it  into  something  closely  akin  to 
the  primitive  power  of  nature  itself.  "  In  the  Shake- 
spearian drama,"  he  says,  "  there  is  a  vitality  which 
grows  and  evolves  itself  from  within." 

Again — 

"  He,  too,  worked  in  the  spirit  of  nature,  by  evolving  the  germ 
from  within,  by  the  imaginative  power,  according  to  the  idea. 
For  as  the  power  of  seeing  is  to  light,  so  is  an  idea  in  mind  to 
a  law  in  nature.  They  are  correlatives  which  suppose  each 
other." 


8o  APPRECIATIONS 

Again — 

"  The  organic  form  is  innate :  it  shapes,  as  it  develops, 
itself  from  within,  and  the  fulness  of  its  development  is  one  and 
the  same  with  the  perfection  of  its  outward  form.  Such  as  the 
life  is,  such  is  the  form.  Nature,  the  prime,  genial  artist,  in- 
exhaustible in  diverse  powers,  is  equally  inexhaustible  in  forms  : 
each  exterior  is  the  physiognomy  of  the  being  within,  and  even 
such  is  the  appropriate  excellence  of  Shakespeare,  himself  a 
nature  humanised,  a  genial  understanding,  directing  self- 
consciously a  power  and  an  implicit  wisdom  deeper  even  than 
our  consciousness." 

In  this  late  age  we  are  become  so  familiarised  with 
the  greater  works  of  art  as  to  be  little  sensitive 
of  the  act  of  creation  in  them  :  they  do  not  impress 
us  as  a  new  presence  in  the  world.  Only  sometimes, 
in  productions  which  realise  immediately  a  profound 
influence  and  enforce  a  change  in  taste,  we  are  actual 
witnesses  of  the  moulding  of  an  unforeseen  type  by 
some  new  principle  of  association  ;  and  to  that 
phenomenon  Coleridge  wisely  recalls  our  attention. 
What  makes  his  view  a  one-sided  one  is,  that  in  it 
the  artist  has  become  almost  a  mechanical  agent : 
instead  of  the  most  luminous  and  self-possessed  phase 
of  consciousness,  the  associative  act  in  art  or  poetry 
is  made  to  look  like  some  blindly  organic  process  of 
assimilation.  The  work  of  art  is  likened  to  a  living 
organism.  That  expresses  truly  the  sense  of  a 
self-delighting,  independent   life  which   the   finished 


COLERIDGE  8  J 

work  of  art  gives  us  :  it  hardly  figures  the  process 
by  which  such  work  was  produced.  Here  there  is 
no  blind  ferment  of  lifeless  elements  towards  the 
realisation  of  a  type.  By  exquisite  analysis  the  artist 
attains  clearness  of  idea  ;  then,  through  many  stages 
of  refining,  clearness  of  expression.  He  moves  slowly 
over  his  work,  calculating  the  tenderest  tone,  and 
restraining  the  subtlest  curve,  never  letting  hand  or 
fancy  move  at  large,  gradually  enforcing  flaccid  spaces 
to  the  higher  degree  of  expressiveness.  The  philo- 
sophic critic,  at  least,  will  value,  even  in  works  of 
imagination,  seemingly  the  most  intuitive,  the  power 
of  the  understanding  in  them,  their  logical  process  of 
construction,  the  spectacle  of  a  supreme  intellectual 
dexterity  which  they  afford. 

Coleridge's  prose  writings  on  philosophy,  politics, 
religion,  and  criticism,  were,  in  truth,  but  one  element 
in  a  whole  lifetime  of  endeavours  to  present  the  then 
recent  metaphysics  of  Germany  to  English  readers, 
as  a  legitimate  expansion  of  the  older,  classical  and 
native  masters  of  what  has  been  variously  called  the 
a  priori,  or  absolute,  or  spiritual,  or  Platonic,  view  of 
things.  His  criticism,  his  challenge  for  recognition 
in  the  concrete,  visible,  finite  work  of  art,  of  the  dim, 
unseen,  comparatively  infinite,  soul  or  power  of  the 
artist,  may  well  be  remembered  as  part  of  the  long 


82  APPRECIATIONS 

pleading  of  German  culture  for  the  things  "  behind 
the  veil."  To  introduce  that  spiritual  philosophy,  as 
represented  by  the  more  transcendental  parts  of 
Kant,  and  by  Schelling,  into  all  subjects,  as  a  system 
of  reason  in  them,  one  and  ever  identical  with  itself, 
however  various  the  matter  through  which  it  was 
diffused,  became  with  him  the  motive  of  an  unflagging 
enthusiasm,  which  seems  to  have  been  the  one  thread 
of  continuity  in  a  life  otherwise  singularly  wanting 
in  unity  of  purpose,  and  in  which  he  was  certainly 
far  from  uniformly  at  his  best.  Fragmentary  and 
obscure,  but  often  eloquent,  and  always  at  once 
earnest  and  ingenious,  those  writings,  supplementing 
his  remarkable  gift  of  conversation,  were  directly  and 
indirectly  influential,  even  on  some  the  furthest  re- 
moved from  Coleridge's  own  masters  ;  on  John  Stuart 
Mill,  for  instance,  and  some  of  the  earlier  writers  of 
the  "  high-church  "  school.  Like  his  verse,  they  dis- 
play him  also  in  two  other  characters — as  a  student 
of  words,  and  as  a  psychologist,  that  is,  as  a  more 
minute  observer  or  student  than  other  men  of  the 
phenomena  of  mind.  To  note  the  recondite  associa- 
tions of  words,  old  or  new ;  to  expound  the  logic,  the 
reasonable  soul,  of  their  various  uses ;  to  recover  the 
interest  of  older  writers  who  had  had  a  phraseology 
of  their  own — this  was  a  vein  of  inquiry  allied  to  his 
undoubted  gift  of  tracking  out  and  analysing  curious 


COLERIDGE  83 

modes  of  thought.  A  quaint  fragment  of  verse  on 
Human  Life  might  serve  to  illustrate  his  study  of  the 
earlier  English  philosophical  poetry.  The  latter  gift, 
that  power  of  the  "  subtle  -souled  psychologist,"  as 
Shelley  calls  him,  seems  to  have  been  connected  with 
some  tendency  to  disease  in  the  physical  tempera- 
ment, something  of  a  morbid  want  of  balance  in  those 
parts  where  the  physical  and  intellectual  elements 
mix  most  closely  together,  with  a  kind  of  languid 
visionariness,  deep-seated  in  the  very  constitution  of 
the  "  narcotist,"  who  had  quite  a  gift  for  "  plucking  the 
poisons  of  self-harm,"  and  which  the  actual  habit  of 
taking  opium,  accidentally  acquired,  did  but  reinforce. 
This  morbid  languor  of  nature,  connected  both  with 
his  fitfulness  of  purpose  and  his  rich  delicate  dreami- 
ness, qualifies  Coleridge's  poetic  composition  even 
more  than  his  prose  ;  his  verse,  with  the  exception 
of  his  avowedly  political  poems,  being,  unlike  that  of 
the  "  Lake  School,"  to  which  in  some  respects  he 
belongs,  singularly  unaffected  by  any  moral,  or  pro- 
fessional, or  personal  effort  or  ambition, — "  written," 
as  he  says,  "  after  the  more  violent  emotions  of 
sorrow,  to  give  him  pleasure,  when  perhaps  nothing 
else  could  ; "  but  coming  thus,  indeed,  very  close  to 
his  own  most  intimately  personal  characteristics,  and 
having  a  certain  languidly  soothing  grace  or  cadence, 
for  its  most  fixed  quality,  from  first  to  last.      After 


84  APPRECIA  TIONS 

some  Platonic  soliloquy  on  a  flower  opening  on  a  fine 
day  in  February,  he  goes  on — 

"  Dim  similitudes 
Weaving  in  mortal  strains,  I've  stolen  one  hour 
From  anxious  self,  life's  cruel  taskmaster  ! 
And  the  warm  wooings  of  this  sunny  day 
Tremble  along  my  frame  and  harmonise 
The  attempered  organ,  that  even  saddest  thoughts 
Mix  with  some  sweet  sensations,  like  harsh  tunes 
Played  deftly  on  a  sweet-toned  instrument." 

The  expression  of  two  opposed,  yet  allied,  ele- 
ments of  sensibility  in  these  lines,  is  very  true  to 
Coleridge : — the  grievous  agitation,  the  grievous  list- 
lessness,  almost  never  entirely  relieved,  together  with  a 
certain  physical  voluptuousness.  He  has  spoken 
several  times  of  the  scent  of  the  bean-field  in  the  air  : 
— the  tropical  touches  in  a  chilly  climate  ;  his  is  a 
nature  that  will  make  the  most  of  these,  which  finds 
a  sort  of  caress  in  such  things.  Kubla  Khan,  the 
fragment  of  a  poem  actually  composed  in  some 
certainly  not  quite  healthy  sleep,  is  perhaps  chiefly 
of  interest  as  showing,  by  the  mode  of  its  composition, 
how  physical,  how  much  of  a  diseased  or  valetudi- 
narian temperament,  in  its  moments  of  relief,  Cole- 
ridge's happiest  gift  really  was  ;  and  side  by  side 
with  Kubla  Khan  should  be  read,  as  Coleridge  placed 
it,  the  Pains  of  Sleep,  to  illustrate  that  retarding 
physical  burden  in  his  temperament,  that  "  unimpas- 


COLERIDGE  85 

sioned  grief,"  the  source  of  which  lay  so  near  the 
source  of  those  pleasures.  Connected  also  with  this, 
and  again  in  contrast  with  Wordsworth,  is  the  limited 
quantity  of  his  poetical  performance,  as  he  himself 
regrets  so  eloquently  in  the  lines  addressed  to  Words- 
worth after  his  recitation  of  TJu  Prelude.  It  is  like 
some  exotic  plant,  just  managing  to  blossom  a  little 
in  the  somewhat  un-english  air  of  Coleridge's  own 
south-western  birthplace,  but  never  quite  well  there. 

In  1798  he  joined  Wordsworth  in  the  composi- 
tion of  a  volume  of  poems — the  Lyrical  Ballads. 
What  Wordsworth  then  wrote  already  vibrates 
with  that  blithe  impulse  which  carried  him  to  final 
happiness  and  self-possession.  In  Coleridge  we  feel 
already  that  faintness  and  obscure  dejection  which 
clung  like  some  contagious  damp  to  all  his  work. 
Wordsworth  was  to  be  distinguished  by  a  joyful  and 
penetrative  conviction  of  the  existence  of  certain 
latent  affinities  between  nature  and  the  human  mind, 
which  reciprocally  gild  the  mind  and  nature  with  a 
kind  of  "  heavenly  alchemy." 

"  My  voice  proclaims 
How  exquisitely  the  individual  mind 
(And  the  progressive  powers,  perhaps,  no  less 
Of  the  whole  species)  to  the  external  world 
Is  fitted  ;  and  how  exquisitely,  too, 
The  external  world  is  fitted  to  the  mind  ; 

G 


86  APPRECIATIONS 

And  the  creation,  by  no  lower  name 

Can  it  be  called,  which  they  with  blended  might 

Accomplish." 

In  Wordsworth  this  took  the  form  of  an  unbroken 
dreaming  over  the  aspects  and  transitions  of  nature — 
a  reflective,  though  altogether  unformulated,  analysis 
of  them. 

There  are  in  Coleridge's  poems  expressions  of 
this  conviction  as  deep  as  Wordsworth's.  But  Cole- 
ridge could  never  have  abandoned  himself  to  the 
dream,  the  vision,  as  Wordsworth  did,  because  the 
first  condition  of  such  abandonment  must  be  an 
unvexed  quietness  of  heart.  No  one  can  read  the 
Lines  composed  above  Tintern  without  feeling  how 
potent  the  physical  element  was  among  the  conditions 
of  Wordsworth's  genius — "  felt  in  the  blood  and  felt 
along  the  heart." 

"  My  whole  life  I  have  lived  in  quiet  thought ! " 

The  stimulus  which  most  artists  require  of  nature 
he  can  renounce.  He  leaves  the  ready-made  glory 
of  the  Swiss  mountains  that  he  may  reflect  glory  on  a 
mouldering  leaf.  He  loves  best  to  watch  the  floating 
thistledown,  because  of  its  hint  at  an  unseen  life  in 
the  air.  Coleridge's  temperament,  ael  iv  c<poSpa 
bpe%ei,  with  its  faintness,  its  grieved  dejection,  could 
never  have  been  like  that. 


COLERIDGE  87 

"  My  genial  spirits  fail ; 

And  what  can  these  avail 
To  lift  the  smothering  weight  from  off  my  breast  ? 

It  were  a  vain  endeavour, 

Though  I  should  gaze  for  ever 
On  that  green  light  that  lingers  in  the  west : 
I  may  not  hope  from  outward  forms  to  win 
The  passion  and  the  life  whose  fountains  are  within." 

Wordsworth's  flawless  temperament,  his  fine 
mountain  atmosphere  of  mind,  that  calm,  sabbatic, 
mystic,  wellbeing  which  De  Quincey,  a  little  cynic- 
ally, connected  with  worldly  (that  is  to  say,  pecuniary) 
good  fortune,  kept  his  conviction  of  a  latent  intelli- 
gence in  nature  within  the  limits  of  sentiment  or 
instinct,  and  confined  it  to  those  delicate  and  subdued 
shades  of  expression  which  alone  perfect  art  allows. 
In  Coleridge's  sadder,  more  purely  intellectual,  cast 
of  genius,  what  with  Wordsworth  was  sentiment  or 
instinct  became  a  philosophical  idea,  or  philosophical 
formula,  developed,  as  much  as  possible,  after  the 
abstract  and  metaphysical  fashion  of  the  transcen- 
dental schools  of  Germany. 

The  period  of  Coleridge's  residence  at  Nether 
Stowey,  1 797-1 798,  was  for  him  the  annus  mira- 
bilis.  Nearly  all  the  chief  works  by  which  his  poetic 
fame  will  live  were  then  composed  or  planned. 
What  shapes  itself  for  criticism  as  the  main  pheno- 
menon of  Coleridge's  poetic  life,  is  not,  as  with  most 


88  APPRECIATIONS 

true  poets,  the  gradual  development  of  a  poetic  gift, 
determined,  enriched,  retarded,  by  the  actual  circum- 
stances of  the  poet's  life,  but  the  sudden  blossoming, 
through  one  short  season,  of  such  a  gift  already 
perfect  in  its  kind,  which  thereafter  deteriorates  as 
suddenly,  with  something  like  premature  old  age. 
Connecting  this  phenomenon  with  the  leading  motive 
of  his  prose  writings,  we  might  note  it  as  the  deteri- 
oration of  a  productive  or  creative  power  into  one 
merely  metaphysical  or  discursive.  In  his  unambi- 
tious conception  of  his  function  as  a  poet,  and  in  the 
very  limited  quantity  of  his  poetical  performance,  as 
I  have  said,  he  was  a  contrast  to  his  friend  Words- 
worth. That  friendship  with  Wordsworth,  the  chief 
"  developing "  circumstance  of  his  poetic  life,  com- 
prehended a  very  close  intellectual  sympathy  ;  and 
in  such  association  chiefly,  lies  whatever  truth  there 
may  be  in  the  popular  classification  of  Coleridge  as 
a  member  of  what  is  called  the  "  Lake  School." 
Coleridge's  philosophical  speculations  do  really  turn 
on  the  ideas  which  underlay  Wordsworth's  poetical 
practice.  His  prose  works  are  one  long  explanation 
of  all  that  is  involved  in  that  famous  distinction 
between  the  Fancy  and  the  Imagination.  Of  what 
is  understood  by  both  writers  as  the  imaginative 
quality  in  the  use  of  poetic  figures,  we  may  take 
some  words  of  Shakespeare  as  an  example. — 


COLERIDGE  89 

"  My  cousin  Suffolk, 
My  soul  shall  thine  keep  company  to  heaven : 
Tarry,  sweet  soul,  for  mine,  then  fly  abreast." 

The  complete  infusion  here  of  the  figure  into  the 
thought,  so  vividly  realised,  that,  though  birds  are 
not  actually  mentioned,  yet  the  sense  of  their  flight, 
conveyed  to  us  by  the  single  word  "  abreast,"  comes 
to  be  more  than  half  of  the  thought  itself: — this,  as 
the  expression  of  exalted  feeling,  is  an  instance  of 
what  Coleridge  meant  by  Imagination.  And  this 
sort  of  identification  of  the  poet's  thought,  of  himself, 
with  the  image  or  figure  which  serves  him,  is  the 
secret,  sometimes,  of  a  singularly  entire  realisation 
of  that  image,  such  as  makes  these  lines  of  Coleridge, 
for  instance,  "  imaginative  " — 

"  Amid  the  howl  of  more  than  wintry  storms, 
The  halcyon  hears  the  voice  of  vernal  hours 
Already  on  the  wing." 

There  are  many  such  figures  both  in  Coleridge's 
verse  and  prose.  He  has,  too,  his  passages  of  that 
sort  of  impassioned  contemplation  on  the  permanent 
and  elementary  conditions  of  nature  and  humanity, 
which  Wordsworth  held  to  be  the  essence  of  a  poet ; 
as  it  would  be  his  proper  function  to  awaken  such 
contemplation  in  other  men — those  "  moments,"  as 
Coleridge  says,  addressing  him — 


90  APPRECIA  TIONS 

"  Moments  awful, 
Now  in  thy  inner  life,  and  now  abroad, 
When  power  streamed  from  thee,  and  thy  soul  received 
The  light  reflected,  as  a  light  bestowed." 

The  entire  poem  from  which  these  lines  are  taken, 
"  composed  on  the  night  after  Wordsworth's  recita- 
tion of  a  poem  on  the  growth  of  an  individual  mind," 
is,  in  its  high-pitched  strain  of  meditation,  and  in 
the  combined  justice  and  elevation  of  its  philosophi- 
cal expression — 

"  high  and  passionate  thoughts 
To  their  own  music  chanted  ;" 

wholly  sympathetic  with  The  Prelude  which  it  cele- 
brates, and  of  which  the  subject  is,  in  effect,  the 
generation  of  the  spirit  of  the  "  Lake  poetry."  The 
Lines  to  Joseph  Cottle  have  the  same  philosophically 
imaginative  character  ;  the  Ode  to  Dejection  being 
Coleridge's  most  sustained  effort  of  this  kind. 

It  is  in  a  highly  sensitive  apprehension  of  the 
aspects  of  external  nature  that  Coleridge  identifies 
himself  most  closely  with  one  of  the  main  tendencies 
of  the  "  Lake  School  " ;  a  tendency  instinctive,  and 
no  mere  matter  of  theory,  in  him  as  in  Wordsworth. 

That  record  of  the 

"green  light 
Which  lingers  in  the  west, ' 

and  again,  of 


COLERIDGE  91 

"  the  western  sky, 
And  its  peculiar  tint  of  yellow  green," 

which  Byron  found  ludicrously  untrue,  but  which 
surely  needs  no  defence,  is  a  characteristic  example 
of  a  singular  watchfulness  for  the  minute  fact  and 
expression  of  natural  scenery  pervading  all  he  wrote 
— a  closeness  to  the  exact  physiognomy  of  nature, 
having  something  to  do  with  that  idealistic  philosophy 
which  sees  in  the  external  world  no  mere  concurrence 
of  mechanical  agencies,  but  an  animated  body,  in- 
formed and  made  expressive,  like  the  body  of  man, 
by  an  indwelling  intelligence.  It  was  a  tendency, 
doubtless,  in  the  air,  for  Shelley  too  is  affected  by 
it,  and  Turner,  with  the  school  of  landscape  which 
followed  him.     "  I  had  found,"  Coleridge  tells  us, 

"  That  outward  forms,  the  loftiest,  still  receive 
Their  finer  influence  from  the  world  within  ; 
Fair  ciphers  of  vague  import,  where  the  eye 
Traces  no  spot,  in  which  the  heart  may  read 
History  and  prophecy  :  ..." 

and  this  induces  in  him  no  indifference  to  actual 
colour  and  form  and  process,  but  such  minute  realism 
as  this — 

"  The  thin  grey  cloud  is  spread  on  high, 
It  covers  but  not  hides  the  sky. 
The  moon  is  behind  and  at  the  full ; 
And  yet  she  looks  both  small  and  dull ; " 


92  APPRECIATIONS 

or  this,  which  has  a  touch  of  "romantic"  weirdness — 

"  Nought  was  green  upon  the  oak 
But  moss  and  rarest  misletoe  :" 

or  this — 

"  There  is  not  wind  enough  to  twirl 
The  one  red  leaf,  the  last  of  its  clan, 
That  dances  as  often  as  dance  it  can, 
Hanging  so  light,  and  hanging  so  high, 
On  the  topmost  twig  that  looks  up  at  the  sky :" 

or  this,  with  a  weirdness,  again,  like  that  of  some 
wild  French  etcher — 

"  Lo  !  the  new-moon  winter-bright  ! 
And  overspread  with  phantom  light 
(With  swimming  phantom  light  o'erspread, 
But  rimmed  and  circled  with  a  silver  thread) 
I  see  the  old  moon  in  her  lap,  foretelling 
The  coming  on  of  rain  and  squally  blast." 

He  has  a  like  imaginative  apprehension  of  the  silent 

and  unseen  processes  of  nature,  its  "  ministries "  of 

dew  and  frost,  for  instance  ;  as  when  he  writes,  in 

April — 

11  A  balmy  night !  and  though  the  stars  be  dim, 
Yet  let  us  think  upon  the  vernal  showers 
That  gladden  the  green  earth,  and  we  shall  find 
A  pleasure  in  the  dimness  of  the  stars." 

Of  such  imaginative  treatment  of  landscape  there  is 
no  better  instance  than  the  description  of  The  Dell, 
in  Fears  in  Solitude — 


COLERIDGE  93 

"  A  green  and  silent  spot  amid  the  hills, 
A  small  and  silent  dell !     O'er  stiller  place 
No  singing  skylark  ever  poised  himself — 

"  But  the  dell, 
Bathed  by  the  mist  is  fresh  and  delicate 
As  vernal  cornfield,  or  the  unripe  flax 
When,  through  its  half-transparent  stalks,  at  eve, 
The  level  sunshine  glimmers  with  green  light  : — 

"  The  gust  that  roared  and  died  away 
To  the  distant  tree — 

"  heard  and  only  heard 
In  this  low  dell,  bowed  not  the  delicate  grass." 

This  curious  insistence  of  the  mind  on  one  par- 
ticular spot,  till  it  seems  to  attain  actual  expression 
and  a  sort  of  soul  in  it — a  mood  so  characteristic^ 
the  "  Lake  School " — occurs  in  an  earnest  political 
poem,  "  written  in  April  1798,  during  the  alarm  of  an 
invasion "  ;  and  that  silent  dell  is  the  background 
against  which  the  tumultuous  fears  of  the  poet  are  in 
strong  relief,  while  the  quiet  sense  of  the  place,  main- 
tained all  through  them,  gives  a  true  poetic  unity  to 
the  piece.  Good  political  poetry — political  poetry  that 
shall  be  permanently  moving — can,  perhaps,  only  be 
written  on  motives  which,  for  those  they  concern, 
have  ceased  to  be  open  questions,  and  are  really 
beyond  argument ;  while  Coleridge's  political  poems 
are  for  the  most  part  on  open  questions.  For 
although    it  was    a    great    part    of   his    intellectual 


94  APPRECIA  TIONS 

ambition  to  subject  political  questions  to  the  action 
of  the  fundamental  ideas  of  his  philosophy,  he  was 
nevertheless  an  ardent  partisan,  first  on  one  side, 
then  on  the  other,  of  the  actual  politics  proper  to 
the  end  of  the  last  and  the  beginning  of  the  present 
century,  where  there  is  still  room  for  much  difference 
of  opinion.  Yet  The  Destiny  of  Nations,  though  form- 
less as  a  whole,  and  unfinished,  presents  many  traces 
of  his  most  elevated  manner  of  speculation,  cast  into 
that  sort  of  imaginative  philosophical  expression,  in 
which,  in  effect,  the  language  itself  is  inseparable 
from,  or  essentially  a  part  of,  the  thought.  France, 
an  Ode,  begins  with  a  famous  apostrophe  to  Liberty — 

"  Ye  Clouds  !  that  far  above  me  float  and  pause, 

Whose  pathless  march  no  mortal  may  control  ! 

Ye  Ocean-waves  !  that  wheresoe'er  ye  roll, 
Yield  homage  only  to  eternal  laws  ! 
Ye  Woods  !  that  listen  to  the  night-bird's  singing, 

Midway  the  smooth  and  perilous  slope  reclined, 
Save  when  your  own  imperious  branches  swinging, 

Have  made  a  solemn  music  of  the  wind  ! 
Where  like  a  man  beloved  of  God, 
Through  glooms  which  never  woodman  trod, 

How  oft,  pursuing  fancies  holy, 
My  moonlight  way  o'er  flowering  weeds  I  wound, 
Inspired,  beyond  the  guess  of  folly, 
By  each  rude  shape  and  wild  unconquerable  sound  ! 
O  ye  loud  Waves  !  and  O  ye  Forests  high  ! 

And  O  ye  Clouds  that  far  above  me  soar'd ! 


COLERIDGE  95 

Thou  rising  Sun  !  thou  blue  rejoicing  Sky  ! 
Yea,  everything  that  is  and  will  be  free ! 
Bear  witness  for  me,  wheresoe'er  ye  be, 
With  what  deep  worship  I  have  still  adored 
The  spirit  of  divinest  liberty." 

And  the  whole  ode,  though,  after  Coleridge's  way, 
not  quite  equal  to  that  exordium,  is  an  example  of 
strong  national  sentiment,  partly  in  indignant  re- 
action against  his  own  earlier  sympathy  with  the 
French  Republic,  inspiring  a  composition  which,  in 
spite  of  some  turgid  lines,  really  justifies  itself  as 
poetry,  and  has  that  true  unity  of  effect  which  the 
ode  requires.  Liberty,  after  all  his  hopes  of  young 
France,  is  only  to  be  found  in  nature  : — 

"  Thou  speedest  on  thy  subtle  pinions, 
The  guide  of  homeless  winds,  and  playmate  of  the  waves  !  " 

In  his  changes  of  political  sentiment,  Coleridge 
was  associated  with  the  "  Lake  School "  ;  and  there 
is  yet  one  other  very  different  sort  of  sentiment  in 
which  he  is  one  with  that  school,  yet  all  himself,  his 
sympathy,  namely,  with  the  animal  world.  That 
was  a  sentiment  connected  at  once  with  the  love  of 
outward  nature  in  himself  and  in  the  "  Lake  School," 
and  its  assertion  of  the  natural  affections  in  their 
simplicity  ;  with  the  homeliness  and  pity,  consequent 
upon  that  assertion.  The  Lines  to  a  Young  Ass, 
tethered — 


96  APPRECIATIONS 

"  Where  the  close-eaten  grass  is  scarcely  seen, 
While  sweet  around  her  waves  the  tempting  green," 

which  had  seemed  merely  whimsical  in  their  day, 
indicate  a  vein  of  interest  constant  in  Coleridge's 
poems,  and  at  its  height  in  his  greatest  poems — in 
Christabel,  where  it  has  its  effect,  as  it  were  anti- 
pathetically,  in  the  vivid  realisation  of  the  serpentine 
element  in  Geraldine's  nature ;  and  in  The  Ancient 
Mariner,  whose  fate  is  interwoven  with  that  of  the 
wonderful  bird,  at  whose  blessing  of  the  water-snakes 
the  curse  for  the  death  of  the  albatross  passes  away, 
and  where  the  moral  of  the  love  of  all  creatures,  as  a 
sort  of  religious  duty,  is  definitely  expressed. 

Christabel,  though  not  printed  till  1 8 1 6,  was 
written  mainly  in  the  year  1797  :  The  Rhyme  of  the 
Ancient  Mariner  was  printed  as  a  contribution  to  the 
Lyrical  Ballads  in  1798  ;  and  these  two  poems 
belong  to  the  great  year  of  Coleridge's  poetic  pro- 
duction, his  twenty -fifth  year.  In  poetic  quality, 
above  all  in  that  most  poetic  of  all  qualities,  a  keen 
sense  of,  and  delight  in  beauty,  the  infection  of 
which  lays  hold  upon  the  reader,  they  are  quite  out 
of  proportion  to  all  his  other  compositions.  The  form 
in  both  is  that  of  the  ballad,  with  some  of  its  ter- 
minology, and  some  also  of  its  quaint  conceits.  They 
connect  themselves  with  that  revival  of  ballad  litera- 
ture, of  which  Percy's  Relics,  and,  in  another  way, 


COLERIDGE  97 

Macpherson's    Ossian    are    monuments,    and    which 
afterwards  so  powerfully  affected  Scott — 
"  Young-eyed  poesy 
All  deftly  masked  as  hoar  antiquity." 

The  Ancient  Mariner,  as  also,  in  its  measure, 
Christabel,  is  a  "  romantic "  poem,  impressing  us  by 
bold  invention,  and  appealing  to  that  taste  for  the 
supernatural,  that  longing  for  le  frisson,  a  shudder,  to 
which  the  "  romantic "  school  in  Germany,  and  its 
derivations  in  England  and  France,  directly  minis- 
tered. In  Coleridge,  personally,  this  taste  had  been 
encouraged  by  his  odd  and  out-of-the-way  reading 
in  the  old-fashioned  literature  of  the  marvellous — 
books  like  Purchas's  Pilgrims,  early  voyages  like 
Hakluyt's,  old  naturalists  and  visionary  moralists, 
like  Thomas  Burnet,  from  whom  he  quotes  the  motto 
of  The  Ancient  Mari7ier,  "Facile  credo, plures  esse 
naturas  invisibiles  quant  visibiles  in  return  universitate, 
etcV  Fancies  of  the  strange  things  which  may  very 
well  happen,  even  in  broad  daylight,  to  men  shut  up 
alone  in  ships  far  off  on  the  sea,  seem  to  have  occurred 
to  the  human  mind  in  all  ages  with  a  peculiar  readi- 
ness, and  often  have  about  them,  from  the  story  of 
the  stealing  of  Dionysus  downwards,  the  fascination 
of  a  certain  dreamy  grace,  which  distinguishes  them 
from  other  kinds  of  marvellous  inventions.  This 
sort  of  fascination  The  Ancient  Mariner  brings  to  its 


98  APPRECIATIONS 

highest  degree  :  it  is  the  delicacy,  the  dreamy  grace, 
in  his  presentation  of  the  marvellous,  which  makes 
Coleridge's  work  so  remarkable.  The  too  palpable 
intruders  from  a  spiritual  world  in  almost  all  ghost 
literature,  in  Scott  and  Shakespeare  even,  have  a 
kind  of  crudity  or  coarseness.  Coleridge's  power  is 
in  the  very  fineness  with  which,  as  by  some  really 
ghostly  finger,  he  brings  home  to  our  inmost  sense 
his  inventions,  daring  as  they  are — the  skeleton  ship, 
the  polar  spirit,  the  inspiriting  of  the  dead  corpses  of 
the  ship's  crew.  The  Rhyme  of  the  Ancient  Mariner 
has  the  plausibility,  the  perfect  adaptation  to  reason 
and  the  general  aspect  of  life,  which  belongs  to  the 
marvellous,  when  actually  presented  as  part  of  a 
credible  experience  in  our  dreams.  Doubtless,  the 
mere  experience  of  the  opium-eater,  the  habit  he  must 
almost  necessarily  fall  into  of  noting  the  more  elusive 
phenomena  of  dreams,  had  something  to  do  with 
that :  in  its  essence,  however,  it  is  connected  with  a 
more  purely  intellectual  circumstance  in  the  develop- 
ment of  Coleridge's  poetic  gift.  Some  one  once  asked 
William  Blake,  to  whom  Coleridge  has  many  resem- 
blances, when  either  is  at  his  best  (that  whole  episode 
of  the  re-inspiriting  of  the  ship's  crew  in  The  Ancient 
Mariner  being  comparable  to  Blake's  well-known 
design  of  the  "  Morning  Stars  singing  together ") 
whether  he  had  ever  seen  a  ghost,  and  was  surprised 


COLERIDGE  99 

when  the  famous  seer,  who  ought,  one  might  think, 
to  have  seen  so  many,  answered  frankly,  "  Only 
once  !"  His  "spirits,"  at  once  more  delicate,  and  so 
much  more  real,  than  any  ghost — the  burden,  as 
they  were  the  privilege,  of  his  temperament — like  it, 
were  an  integral  element  in  his  everyday  life.  And 
the  difference  of  mood  expressed  in  that  question 
and  its  answer,  is  indicative  of  a  change  of  temper 
in  regard  to  the  supernatural  which  has  passed  over 
the  whole  modern  mind,  and  of  which  the  true 
measure  is  the  influence  of  the  writings  of  Sweden- 
borg.  What  that  change  is  we  may  see  if  we 
compare  the  vision  by  which  Swedenborg  was  "  called," 
as  he  thought,  to  his  work,  with  the  ghost  which 
called  Hamlet,  or  the  spells  of  Marlowe's  Faust  with 
those  of  Goethe's.  The  modern  mind,  so  minutely 
self-scrutinising,  if  it  is  to  be  affected  at  all  by  a 
sense  of  the  supernatural,  needs  to  be  more  finely 
touched  than  was  possible  in  the  older,  romantic 
presentment  of  it.  The  spectral  object,  so  crude,  so 
impossible,  has  become  plausible,  as 

"  The  blot  upon  the  brain, 
That  will  show  itself  without ;" 

and  is  understood  to  be  but  a  condition  of  one's  own 
mind,  for  which,  according  to  the  scepticism,  latent 
at  least,  in  so  much  of  our  modern  philosophy,  the 


ioo  APPRECIATIONS 

so-called  real  things  themselves  are  but  spectra 
after  all. 

It  is  this  finer,  more  delicately  marvellous  super- 
naturalism,  fruit  of  his  more  delicate  psychology, 
that  Coleridge  infuses  into  romantic  adventure,  itself 
also  then  a  new  or  revived  thing  in  English  litera- 
ture ;  and  with  a  fineness  of  weird  effect  in  The 
Ancient  Mariner,  unknown  in  those  older,  more 
simple,  romantic  legends  and  ballads.  It  is  a  flower 
of  medieval  or  later  German  romance,  growing  up  in 
the  peculiarly  compounded  atmosphere  of  modern 
psychological  speculation,  and  putting  forth  in  it 
wholly  new  qualities.  The  quaint  prose  commentary, 
which  runs  side  by  side  with  the  verse  of  The  Ancient 
Mariner,  illustrates  this — a  composition  of  quite  a 
different  shade  of  beauty  and  merit  from  that  of  the 
verse  which  it  accompanies,  connecting  this,  the  chief 
poem  of  Coleridge,  with  his  philosophy,  and  emphasis- 
ing therein  that  psychological  interest  of  which  I 
have  spoken,  its  curious  soul-lore. 

Completeness,  the  perfectly  rounded  wholeness 
and  unity  of  the  impression  it  leaves  on  the  mind  of 
a  reader  who  fairly  gives  himself  to  it — that,  too,  is 
one  of  the  characteristics  of  a  really  excellent  work, 
in  the  poetic  as  in  every  other  kind  of  art ;  and  by 
this  completeness,  The  Ancient  Mariner  certainly 
gains  upon  Christabel — a  completeness,  entire  as  that 


COLERIDGE  101 

of  Wordsworth's  Leech- gatherer,  or  Keats's  Saint 
Agnes'  Eve,  each  typical  in  its  way  of  such  wholeness 
or  entirety  of  effect  on  a  careful  reader.  It  is  Cole- 
ridge's one  great  complete  work,  the  one  really  finished 
thing,  in  a  life  of  many  beginnings.  Christabel  re- 
mained a  fragment.  In  The  Ancient  Mariner  this 
unity  is  secured  in  part  by  the  skill  with  which  the 
incidents  of  the  marriage-feast  are  made  to  break  in 
dreamily  from  time  to  time  upon  the  main  story.  And 
then,  how  pleasantly,  how  reassuringly,  the  whole 
nightmare  story  itself  is  made  to  end,  among  the  clear 
fresh  sounds  and  lights  of  the  bay,  where  it  began,  with 
"  The  moon-light  steeped  in  silentness, 
The  steady  weather-cock." 

So  different  from  The  Rhyme  of  the  Ancient 
Mariner  in  regard  to  this  completeness  of  effect, 
Christabel  illustrates  the  same  complexion  of  motives, 
a  like  intellectual  situation.  Here,  too,  the  work  is  of 
a  kind  peculiar  to  one  who  touches  the  characteristic 
motives  of  the  old  romantic  ballad,  with  a  spirit  made 
subtle  and  fine  by  modern  reflection  ;  as  we  feel,  I 
think,  in  such  passages  as — 

"  But  though  my  slumber  had  gone  by, 
This  dream  it  would  not  pass  away — 
It  seems  to  live  upon  mine  eye ;" — 


and- 


"  For  she,  belike,  hath  drunken  deep 
Of  all  the  blessedness  of  sleep  ;" — 
H 


102  APPRECIATIONS 

and  again — 

"  With  such  perplexity  of  mind 

As  dreams  too  lively  leave  behind." 

And  that  gift  of  handling  the  finer  passages  of 
human  feeling,  at  once  with  power  and  delicacy, 
which  was  another  result  of  his  finer  psychology,  of 
his  exquisitely  refined  habit  of  self- reflection,  is 
illustrated  by  a  passage  on  Friendship  in  the  Second- 
Part — 

"  Alas  !  they  had  been  friends  in  youth  ; 
But  whispering  tongues  can  poison  truth  ; 
And  constancy  lives  in  realms  above  ; 
And  life  is  thorny  ;  and  youth  is  vain  ; 
And  to  be  wroth  with  one  we  love, 
Doth  work  like  madness  in  the  brain. 
And  thus  it  chanced,  as  I  divine, 
With  Roland  and  Sir  Leoline. 
Each  spake  words  of  high  disdain 
And  insult  to  his  heart's  best  brother  : 
They  parted — ne'er  to  meet  again  ! 
But  never  either  found  another 
To  free  the  hollow  heart  from  paining — 
They  stood  aloof  the  scars  remaining, 
Like  cliffs  which  had  been  rent  asunder ; 
A  dreary  sea  now  flows  between  ; 
But  neither  heat,  nor  frost,  nor  thunder, 
Shall  wholly  do  away,  I  ween, 
The  marks  of  that  which  once  hath  been." 

I  suppose  these  lines  leave  almost  every  reader 
with  a  quickened  sense  of  the  beauty  and  compass  of 


COLERIDGE  103 

human  feeling  ;  and  it  is  the  sense  of  such  richness 
and  beauty  which,  in  spite  of  his  "  dejection,"  in  spite 
of  that  burden  of  his  morbid  lassitude,  accompanies 
Coleridge  himself  through  life.  A  warm  poetic  joy 
in  everything  beautiful,  whether  it  be  a  moral  senti- 
ment, like  the  friendship  of  Roland  and  Leoline,  or 
only  the  flakes  of  falling  light  from  the  water-snakes 
— this  joy,  visiting  him,  now  and  again,  after  sickly 
dreams,  in  sleep  or  waking,  as  a  relief  not  to  be 
forgotten,  and  with  such  a  power  of  felicitous  ex- 
pression that  the  infection  of  it  passes  irresistibly  to 
the  reader — such  is  the  predominant  element  in  the 
matter  of  his  poetry,  as  cadence  is  the  predominant 
quality  of  its  form.  "  We  bless  thee  for  our  crea- 
tion !"  he  might  have  said,  in  his  later  period  of 
definite  religious  assent,  "  because  the  world  is  so 
beautiful :  the  world  of  ideas — living  spirits,  detached 
from  the  divine  nature  itself,  to  inform  and  lift  the 
heavy  mass  of  material  things  ;  the  world  of  man, 
above  all  in  his  melodious  and  intelligible  speech  ; 
the  world  of  living  creatures  and  natural  scenery  ;  the 
world  of  dreams."  What  he  really  did  say,  by  way 
of  A  Tombless  Epitaph,  is  true  enough  of  himself — 

"  Sickness,  'tis  true, 
Whole  years  of  weary  days,  besieged  him  close, 
Even  to  the  gates  and  inlets  of  his  life  ! 
But  it  is  true,  no  less,  that  strenuous,  firm, 


io4  APPRECIATIONS 

And  with  a  natural  gladness,  he  maintained 
The  citadel  unconquered,  and  in  joy 
Was  strong  to  follow  the  delightful  Muse. 
For  not  a  hidden  path,  that  to  the  shades 
Of  the  beloved  Parnassian  forest  leads, 
Lurked  undiscovered  by  him  ;  not  a  rill 
There  issues  from  the  fount  of  Hippocrene, 
But  he  had  traced  it  upward  to  its  source, 
Through  open  glade,  dark  glen,  and  secret  dell, 
Knew  the  gay  wild  flowers  on  its  banks,  and  culled 
Its  med'cinable  herbs.     Yea,  oft  alone, 
Piercing  the  long-neglected  holy  cave, 
The  haunt  obscure  of  old  Philosophy, 
He  bade  with  lifted  torch  its  starry  walls 
Sparkle,  as  erst  they  sparkled  to  the  flame 
Of  odorous  lamps  tended  by  saint  and  sage. 
O  framed  for  calmer  times  and  nobler  hearts  ! 
O  studious  Poet,  eloquent  for  truth  ! 
Philosopher  !  contemning  wealth  and  death, 
Yet  docile,  childlike,  full  of  Life  and  Love." 

The  student  of  empirical  science  asks,  Are 
absolute  principles  attainable  ?  What  are  the  limits 
of  knowledge  ?  The  answer  he  receives  from  science 
itself  is  not  ambiguous.  What  the  moralist  asks  is, 
Shall  we  gain  or  lose  by  surrendering  human  life  to 
the  relative  spirit?  Experience  answers  that  the 
dominant  tendency  of  life  is  to  turn  ascertained  truth 
into  a  dead  letter,  to  make  us  all  the  phlegmatic 
servants  of  routine.     The  relative  spirit,  by  its  con- 


COLERIDGE  105 

stant  dwelling  on  the  more  fugitive  conditions  or 
circumstances  of  things,  breaking  through  a  thousand 
rough  and  brutal  classifications,  and  giving  elasticity 
to  inflexible  principles,  begets  an  intellectual  finesse 
of  which  the  ethical  result  is  a  delicate  and  tender 
justice  in  the  criticism  of  human  life.  Who  would 
gain  more  than  Coleridge  by  criticism  in  such  a 
spirit  ?  We  know  how  his  life  has  appeared  when 
judged  by  absolute  standards.  We  see  him  trying 
to  "  apprehend  the  absolute,"  to  stereotype  forms  of 
faith  and  philosophy,  to  attain,  as  he  says,  "  fixed 
principles "  in  politics,  morals,  and  religion,  to  fix 
one  mode  of  life  as  the  essence  of  life,  refusing  to 
see  the  parts  as  parts  only  ;  and  all  the  time  his 
own  pathetic  history  pleads  for  a  more  elastic  moral 
philosophy  than  his,  and  cries  out  against  every 
formula  less  living  and  flexible  than  life  itself. 

"  From  his  childhood  he  hungered  for  eternity." 
There,  after  all,  is  the  incontestable  claim  of  Coleridge. 
The  perfect  flower  of  any  elementary  type  of  life 
must  always  be  precious  to  humanity,  and  Coleridge 
is  a. true  flower  of  the  ennnye',  of  the  type  of  Rend 
More  than  Childe  Harold,  more  than  Werther,  more 
than  Rene  himself,  Coleridge,  by  what  he  did,  what 
he  was,  and  what  he  failed  to  do,  represents  that  inex- 
haustible discontent,  languor,  and  home-sickness,  that 
endless  regret,  the  chords  of  which  ring  all  through 


106  APPREC1A  TIONS 

our  modern  literature.  It  is  to  the  romantic  element 
in  literature  that  those  qualities  belong.  One  day, 
perhaps,  we  may  come  to  forget  the  distant  horizon, 
with  full  knowledge  of  the  situation,  to  be  content 
with  "  what  is  here  and  now " ;  and  herein  is  the 
essence  of  classical  feeling.  But  by  us  of  the  present 
moment,  certainly — by  us  for  whom  the  Greek  spirit, 
with  its  engaging  naturalness,  simple,  chastened, 
debonair,  Tpv(f>fjs,  afipoTijTos,  ^XiBij<i,  yapirwv,  l/xepov, 
ttoOov  irarrjp,  is  itself  the  Sangrail  of  an  endless 
pilgrimage,  Coleridge,  with  his  passion  for  the  absolute, 
for  something  fixed  where  all  is  moving,  his  faint- 
ness,  his  broken  memory,  his  intellectual  disquiet, 
may  still  be  ranked  among  the  interpreters  of  one  of 
the  constituent  elements  of  our  life. 

1865,  1880. 


CHARLES    LAMB 

Those  English  critics  who  at  the  beginning  of  the 
present  century  introduced  from  Germany,  together 
with  some  other  subtleties  of  thought  transplanted 
hither  not  without  advantage,  the  distinction  between 
the  Fancy  and  the  Imagination,  made  much  also  of 
the  cognate  distinction  between  Wit  and  Humour, 
between  that  unreal  and  transitory  mirth,  which  is 
as  the  crackling  of  thorns  under  the  pot,  and  the 
laughter  which  blends  with  tears  and  even  with  the 
sublimities  of  the  imagination,  and  which,  in  its  most 
exquisite  motives,  is  one  with  pity — the  laughter 
of  the  comedies  of  Shakespeare,  hardly  less  expressive 
than  his  moods  of  seriousness  or  solemnity,  of  that 
deeply  stirred  soul  of  sympathy  in  him,  as  flowing 
from  which  both  tears  and  laughter  are  alike  genuine 
and  contagious. 

This  distinction  between  wit  and  humour,  Cole- 
ridge and  other  kindred  critics  applied,  with  much 
effect,  in  their  studies  of  some  of  our  older  English 


108  APPRECIATIONS 

writers.  And  as  the  distinction  between  imagination 
and  fancy,  xnade  popular  by  Wordsworth,  found  its 
best  justification  in  certain  essential  differences  of 
stuff  in  Wordsworth's  own  writings,  so  this  other 
critical  distinction,  between  wit  and  humour,  finds  a 
sort  of  visible  interpretation  and  instance  in  the 
character  and  writings  of  Charles  Lamb  ; — one  who 
lived  more  consistently  than  most  writers  among 
subtle  literary  theories,  and  whose  remains  are  still" 
full  of  curious  interest  for  the  student  of  literature  as 
a  fine  art. 

The  author  of  the  English  Humourists  of  the 
Eighteenth  Century,  coming  to  the  humourists  of  the 
nineteenth,  would  have  found,  as  is  true  pre-eminently 
of  Thackeray  himself,  the  springs  of  pity  in  them 
deepened  by  the  deeper  subjectivity,  the  intenser  and 
closer  living  with  itself,  which  is  characteristic  of  the 
temper  of  the  later  generation  ;  and  therewith,  the 
mirth  also,  from  the  amalgam  of  which  with  pity 
humour  proceeds,  has  become,  in  Charles  Dickens,  for 
example,  freer  and  more  boisterous. 

To  this  more  high-pitched  feeling,  since  pre- 
dominant in  our  literature,  the  writings  of  Charles 
Lamb,  whose  life  occupies  the  last  quarter  of  the 
eighteenth  century  and  the  first  quarter  of  the  nine- 
teenth, are  a  transition  ;  and  such  union  of  grave, 
of  terrible    even,  with   gay,  we    may  note    in    the 


CHARLES  LAMB  109 

circumstances  of  his  life,  as  reflected  thence  into  his 
work.  We  catch  the  aroma  of  a  singular,  homely- 
sweetness  about  his  first  years,  spent  on  Thames' 
side,  amid  the  red  bricks  and  terraced  gardens,  with 
their  rich  historical  memories  of  old-fashioned  legal 
London.  Just  above  the  poorer  class,  deprived,  as 
he  says,  of  the  "  sweet  food  of  academic  institution," 
he  is  fortunate  enough  to  be  reared  in  the  classical 
languages  at  an  ancient  school,  where  he  becomes  the 
companion  of  Coleridge,  as  at  a  later  period  he  was  his 
enthusiastic  disciple.  So  far,  the  years  go  by  with 
less  than  the  usual  share  of  boyish  difficulties  ;  pro- 
tected, one  fancies,  seeing  what  he  was  afterwards,  by 
some  attraction  of  temper  in  the  quaint  child,  small 
and  delicate,  with  a  certain  Jewish,  expression  in 
his  clear,  brown  complexion,  eyes  not  precisely  of 
the  same  colour,  and  a  slow  walk  adding  to  the 
staidness  of  his  figure  ;  and  whose  infirmity  of  speech, 
increased  by  agitation,  is  partly  engaging. 

And  the  cheerfulness  of  all  this,  of  the  mere  aspect 
of  Lamb's  quiet  subsequent  life  also,  might  make  the 
more  superficial  reader  think  of  him  as  in  himself 
something  slight,  and  of  his  mirth  as  cheaply  bought. 
Yet  we  know  that  beneath  this  blithe  surface  there 
was  something  of  the  fateful  domestic  horror,  of  the 
beautiful  heroism  and  devotedness  too,  of  old  Greek 
tragedy.      His  sister  Mary,  ten  years  his  senior,  in  a 


1 10  APPRECIA  TIONS 

sudden  paroxysm  of  madness,  caused  the  death  of  her 
mother,  and  was  brought  to  trial  for  what  an  over- 
strained justice  might  have  construed  as  the  greatest 
of  crimes.  She  was  released  on  the  brother's  pledg- 
ing himself  to  watch  over  her  ;  and  to  this  sister,  from 
the  age  of  twenty -one,  Charles  Lamb  sacrificed 
himself,  "  seeking  thenceforth,"  says  his  earliest 
biographer,  "  no  connexion  which  could  interfere  with 
her  supremacy  in  his  affections,  or  impair  his  ability 
to  sustain  and  comfort  her."  The  "  feverish,  romantic 
tie  of  love,"  he  cast  away  in  exchange  for  the 
"  charities  of  home."  Only,  from  time  to  time,  the 
madness  returned,  affecting  him  too,  once  ;  and  we 
see  the  brother  and  sister  voluntarily  yielding  to 
restraint.  In  estimating  the  humour  of  Elia,  we 
must  no  more  forget  the  strong  undercurrent  of  this 
great  misfortune  and  pity,  than  one  could  forget  it  in 
his  actual  story.  So  he  becomes  the  best  critic, 
almost  the  discoverer,  of  Webster,  a  dramatist  of 
genius  so  sombre,  so  heavily  coloured,  so  macabre. 
Rosamund  Grey,  written  in  his  twenty-third  year,  a 
story  with  something  bitter  and  exaggerated,  an 
almost  insane  fixedness  of  gloom  perceptible  in  it, 
strikes  clearly  this  note  in  his  work. 

For  himself,  and  from  his  own  point  of  view,  the 
exercise  of  his  gift,  of  his  literary  art,  came  to  gild  or 
sweeten  a  life  of  monotonous  labour,  and  seemed,  as 


CHARLES  LAMB  in 

far  as  regarded  others,  no  very  important  thing ; 
availing  to  give  them  a  little  pleasure,  and  inform 
them  a  little,  chiefly  in  a  retrospective  manner,  but 
in  no  way  concerned  with  the  turning  of  the  tides  of 
the  great  world.  And  yet  this  very  modesty,  this 
unambitious  way  of  conceiving  his  work,  has  im- 
pressed upon  it  a  certain  exceptional  enduringness. 
For  of  the  remarkable  English  writers  contemporary 
with  Lamb,  many  were  greatly  preoccupied  with 
ideas  of  practice — religious,  moral,  political — ideas 
which  have  since,  in  some  sense  or  other,  entered 
permanently  into  the  general  consciousness  ;  and, 
these  having  no  longer  any  stimulus  for  a  generation 
provided  with  a  different  stock  of  ideas,  the  writings 
of  those  who  spent  so  much  of  themselves  in  their 
propagation  have  lost,  with  posterity,  something  of 
what  they  gained  by  them  in  immediate  influence. 
Coleridge,  Wordsworth,  Shelley  even — sharing  so 
largely  in  the  unrest  of  their  own  age,  and  made 
personally  more  interesting  thereby,  yet,  of  their 
actual  work,  surrender  more  to  the  mere  course  of 
time  than  some  of  those  who  may  have  seemed  to 
exercise  themselves  hardly  at  all  in  great  matters,  to 
have  been  little  serious,  or  a  little  indifferent,  regard- 
ing them. 

Of  this  number  of  the  disinterested  servants  of 
literature,  smaller  in  England  than  in  France,  Charles 


1 1 2  APPRECIA  TIONS 

Lamb  is  one.  In  the  making  of  prose  he  realises  the 
principle  of  art  for  its  own  sake,  as  completely  as 
Keats  in  the  making  of  verse.  And,  working  ever 
close  to  the  concrete,  to  the  details,  great  or  small,  of 
actual  things,  books,  persons,  and  with  no  part  of 
them  blurred  to  his  vision  by  the  intervention  of 
mere  abstract  theories,  he  has  reached  an  enduring 
moral  effect  also,  in  a  sort  of  boundless  sympathy. 
Unoccupied,  as  he  might  seem,  with  great  matters, 
he  is  in  immediate  contact  with  what  is  real,  especi- 
ally in  its  caressing  littleness,  that  littleness  in  which 
there  is  much  of  the  whole  woeful  heart  of  things, 
and  meets  it  more  than  half-way  with  a  perfect 
understanding  of  it.  What  sudden,  unexpected 
touches  of  pathos  in  him  ! — bearing  witness  how  the 
sorrow  of  humanity,  the  Welt-schmerz,  the  constant 
aching  of  its  wounds,  is  ever  present  with  him  :  but 
what  a  gift  also  for  the  enjoyment  of  life  in  its 
subtleties,  of  enjoyment  actually  refined  by  the  need 
of  some  thoughtful  economies  and  making  the  most 
of  things  !  Little  arts  of  happiness  he  is  ready  to 
teach  to  others.  The  quaint  remarks  of  children 
which  another  would  scarcely  have  heard,  he  preserves 
— little  flies  in  the  priceless  amber  of  his  Attic  wit — 
and  has  his  "Praise  of  chimney-sweepers"  (as 
William  Blake  has  written,  with  so  much  natural 
pathos,  the   Chimney-sweeper's  Song)  valuing  care- 


CHARLES  LAMB  113 

fully  their  white  teeth,  and  fine  enjoyment  of  white 
sheets  in  stolen  sleep  at  Arundel  Castle,  as  he  tells 
the  story,  anticipating  something  of  the  mood  of  our 
deep  humourists  of  the  last  generation.  His  simple 
mother -pity  for  those  who  suffer  by  accident,  or 
unkindness  of  nature,  blindness  for  instance,  or  fateful 
disease  of  mind  like  his  sister's,  has  something  primi- 
tive in  its  largeness;  and  on  behalf  of  ill-used 
animals  he  is  early  in  composing  a  Pity's  Gift. 

And  if,  in  deeper  or  more  superficial  sense,  the 
dead  do  care  at  all  for  their  name  and  fame,  then  how 
must  the  souls  of  Shakespeare  and  Webster  have  been 
stirred,  after  so  long  converse  with  things  that  stopped 
their  ears,  whether  above  or  below  the  soil,  at  his  ex- 
quisite appreciations  of  them  ;  the  souls  of  Titian  and 
of  Hogarth  too  ;  for,  what  has  not  been  observed  so 
generally  as  the  excellence  of  his  literary  criticism, 
Charles  Lamb  is  a  fine  critic  of  painting  also.  It  was 
as  loyal,  self- forgetful  work  for  others,  for  Shakespeare's 
self  first,  for  instance,  and  then  for  Shakespeare's 
readers,  that  that  too  was  done :  he  has  the  true 
scholar's  way  of  forgetting  himself  in  his  subject. 
For  though  "  defrauded,"  as  we  saw,  in  his  young 
years,  "of  the  sweet  food  of  academic  institution," 
he  is  yet  essentially  a  scholar,  and  all  his  work  mainly 
retrospective,  as  I  said  ;  his  own  sorrows,  affections, 
perceptions,  being  alone  real  to  him  of  the  present. 


114  A  PPRECIA  TIONS 

"  I  cannot  make  these  present  times,"  he  says  once, 
"  present  to  me" 

Above  all,  he  becomes  not  merely  an  expositor, 
permanently  valuable,  but  for  Englishmen  almost 
the  discoverer  of  the  old  English  drama.  "  The 
book  is  such  as  I  am  glad  there  should  be,"  he 
modestly  says  of  the  Specimens  of  English  Dramatic 
Poets  who  lived  about  the  time  of  Shakespeare;  to  which, 
however,  he  adds  in  a  series  of  notes  the  very  quint- 
essence of  criticism,  the  choicest  savour  and  perfume 
of  Elizabethan  poetry  being  sorted,  and  stored  here, 
with  a  sort  of  delicate  intellectual  epicureanism, 
which  has  had  the  effect  of  winning  for  these,  then 
almost  forgotten,  poets,  one  generation  after  another 
of  enthusiastic  students.  Could  he  but  have  known 
how  fresh  a  source  of  culture  he  was  evoking  there 
for  other  generations,  through  all  those  years  in 
which,  a  little  wistfully,  he  would  harp  on  the  limita- 
tion of  his  time  by  business,  and  sigh  for  a  better 
fortune  in  regard  to  literary  opportunities  ! 

To  feel  strongly  the  charm  of  an  old  poet  or 
moralist,  the  literary  charm  of  Burton,  for  instance, 
or  Quarles,  or  The  Duchess  of  Newcastle ;  and  then 
to  interpret  that  charm,  to  convey  it  to  others — he 
seeming  to  himself  but  to  hand  on  to  others,  in  mere 
humble  ministration,  that  of  which  for  them  he  is 
really  the  creator — this  is  the  way  of  his  criticism  ; 


CHARLES  LAMB  115 

cast  off  in  a  stray  letter  often,  or  passing  note,  or 
lightest  essay  or  conversation.  It  is  in  such  a  letter, 
for  instance,  that  we  come  upon  a  singularly  penetra- 
tive estimate  of  the  genius  and  writings  of  Defoe. 

Tracking,  with  an  attention  always  alert,  the 
whole  process  of  their  production  to  its  starting-point 
in  the  deep  places  of  the  mind,  he  seems  to  realise 
the  but  half- conscious  intuitions  of  Hogarth  or 
Shakespeare,  and  develops  the  great  ruling  unities 
which  have  swayed  their  actual  work  ;  or  "  puts  up," 
and  takes,  the  one  morsel  of  good  stuff  in  an  old, 
forgotten  writer.  Even  in  what  he  says  casually 
there  comes  an  aroma  of  old  English  ;  noticeable 
echoes,  in  chance  turn  and  phrase,  of  the  great 
masters  of  style,  the  old  masters.  Godwin,  seeing 
in  quotation  a  passage  from  John  Woodvil,  takes  it 
for  a  choice  fragment  of  an  old  dramatist,  and  goes 
to  Lamb  to  assist  him  in  finding  the  author.  His 
power  of  delicate  imitation  in  prose  and  verse  reaches 
the  length  of  a  fine  mimicry  even,  as  in  those  last 
essays  of  Elia  on  Popular  Fallacies,  with  their  gentle 
reproduction  or  caricature  of  Sir  Thomas  Browne, 
showing,  the  more  completely,  his  mastery,  by  dis- 
interested study,  of  those  elements  of  the  man  which 
were  the  real  source  of  style  in  that  great,  solemn 
master  of  old  English,  who,  ready  to  say  what  he 
has  to  say  with  fearless  homeliness,  yet  continually 


1 1 6  APPRECIA  TIONS 

overawes  one  with  touches  of  a  strange  utterance 
from  worlds  afar.  For  it  is  with  the  delicacies  of 
fine  literature  especially,  its  gradations  of  expression, 
its  fine  judgment,  its  pure  sense  of  words,  of  vocabu- 
lary— things,  alas  !  dying  out  in  the  English  literature 
of  the  present,  together  with  the  appreciation  of  them 
in  our  literature  of  the  past — that  his  literary  mission 
is  chiefly  concerned.  And  yet,  delicate,  refining, 
daintily  epicurean,  as  he  may  seem,  when  he  writes 
of  giants  such  as  Hogarth  or  Shakespeare,  though 
often  but  in  a  stray  note,  you  catch  the  sense  of  venera- 
tion with  which  those  great  names  in  past  literature 
and  art  brooded  over  his  intelligence,  his  undiminished 
impressibility  by  the  great  effects  in  them.  Reading, 
commenting  on  Shakespeare, he  is  like  aman  whowaltfs 
alone  under  a  grand  stormy  sky,  and  among  unwonted 
tricks  of  light,  when  powerful  spirits  might  seem  to 
be  abroad  upon  the  air ;  and  the  grim  humour  of 
Hogarth,  as  he  analyses  it,  rises  into  a  kind  of 
spectral  grotesque  ;  while  he  too  knows  the  secret  of 
fine,  significant  touches  like  theirs. 

There  are  traits,  customs,  characteristics  of  houses 
and  dress,  surviving  morsels  of  old  life,  such  as 
Hogarth  has  transferred  so  vividly  into  The  Rake's 
Progress,  or  Marriage  d  la  Mode,  concerning  which 
we  well  understand  how,  common,  uninteresting,  or 
even  worthless  in   themselves,  they  have    come    to 


CHARLES  LAMB  117 

please  us  at  last  as  things  picturesque,  being  set  in 
relief  against  the  modes  of  our  different  age.  Customs, 
stiff  to  us,  stiff  dresses,  stiff  furniture — types  of  cast- 
off  fashions,  left  by  accident,  and  which  no  one  ever 
meant  to  preserve — we  contemplate  with  more  than 
good-nature,  as  having  in  them  the  veritable  accent 
of  a  time,  not  altogether  to  be  replaced  by  its  more 
solemn  and  self-conscious  deposits  ;  like  those  tricks 
of  individuality  which  we  find  quite  tolerable  in 
persons,  because  they  convey  to  us  the  secret  of 
lifelike  expression,  and  with  regard  to  which  we  are 
all  to  some  extent  humourists.  But  it  is  part  of 
the  privilege  of  the  genuine  humourist  to  anticipate 
this  pensive  mood  with  regard  to  the  ways  and 
things  of  his  own  day ;  to  look  upon  the  tricks  in 
manner  of  the  life  about  him  with  that  same  refined, 
purged  sort  of  vision,  which  will  come  naturally  to 
those  of  a  later  generation,  in  observing  whatever 
may  have  survived  by  chance  of  its  mere  external 
habit.  Seeing  things  always  by  the  light  of  an 
understanding  more  entire  than  is  possible  for 
ordinary  minds,  of  the  whole  mechanism  of  human- 
ity, and  seeing  also  the  manner,  the  outward  mode 
or  fashion,  always  in  strict  connexion  with  the 
spiritual  condition  which  determined  it,  a  humourist 
such  as  Charles  Lamb  anticipates  the  enchantment 
of  distance  ;  and  the  characteristics  of  places,  ranks, 

I 


n8  APPRECIATIONS 

habits  of  life,  are  transfigured  for  him,  even  now  and 
in  advance  of  time,  by  poetic  light ;  justifying  what 
some  might  condemn  as  mere  sentimentality,  in  the 
effort  to  hand  on  unbroken  the  tradition  of  such 
fashion  or  accent.  "  The  praise  of  beggars,"  "  the 
cries  of  London,"  the  traits  of  actors  just  grown  "old," 
the  spots  in  "  town "  where  the  country,  its  fresh 
green  and  fresh  water,  still  lingered  on,  one  after 
another,  amidst  the  bustle ;  the  quaint,  dimmed, 
just  played-out  farces,  he  had  relished  so  much, 
coming  partly  through  them  to  understand  the  earlier 
English  theatre  as  a  thing  once  really  alive ;  those 
fountains  and  sun-dials  of  old  gardens,  of  which  he 
entertains  such  dainty  discourse  : — he  feels  the  poetry 
of  these  things,  as  the  poetry  of  things  old  indeed, 
but  surviving  as  an  actual  part  of  the  life  of  the 
present,  and  as  something  quite  different  from  the 
poetry  of  things  flatly  gone  from  us  and  antique, 
which  come  back  to  us,  if  at  all,  as  entire  strangers,  like 
Scott's  old  Scotch-border  personages,  their  oaths  and 
armour.  Such  gift  of  appreciation  depends,  as  I 
said,  on  the  habitual  apprehension  of  men's  life  as  a 
whole — its  organic  wholeness,  as  extending  even  to  the 
least  things  in  it — of  its  outward  manner  in  connexion 
with  its  inward  temper  ;  and  it  involves  a  fine  per- 
ception of  the  congruities,  the  musical  accordance 
between   humanity  and  its  environment  of  custom, 


CHARLES  LAMB  119 

society,  personal  intercourse  ;  as  if  all  this,  with  its 
meetings,  partings,  ceremonies,  gesture,  tones  of 
speech,  were  some  delicate  instrument  on  which  an 
expert  performer  is  playing. 

These  are  some  of  the  characteristics  of  Elia,  one 
essentially  an  essayist,  and  of  the  true  family  of 
Montaigne,  "never  judging,"  as  he  says,  "system- 
wise  of  things,  but  fastening  on  particulars  ;"  saying 
all  things  as  it  were  on  chance  occasion  only,  and  by 
way  of  pastime,  yet  succeeding  thus,  "  glimpse-wise," 
in  catching  and  recording  more  frequently  than  others 
"  the  gayest,  happiest  attitude  of  things  ;"  a  casual 
writer  for  dreamy  readers,  yet  always  giving  the 
reader  so  much  more  than  he  seemed  to  propose. 
There  is  something  of  the  follower  of  George  Fox 
about  him,  and  the  Quaker's  belief  in  the  inward 
light  coming  to  one  passive,  to  the  mere  wayfarer, 
who  will  be  sure  at  all  events  to  lose  no  light  which 
falls  by  the  way — glimpses,  suggestions,  delightful 
half-apprehensions,  profound  thoughts  of  old  philo- 
sophers, hints  of  the  innermost  reason  in  things,  the 
full  knowledge  of  which  is  held  in  reserve  ;  all  the 
varied  stuff,  that  is,  of  which  genuine  essays  are 
made. 

And  with  him,  as  with  Montaigne,  the  desire  of 
self-portraiture  is,  below  all  more  superficial  tendencies, 
the  real  motive  in  writing  at  all — a  desire  closely 


120  APPRECIATIONS 

connected  with  that  intimacy,  that  modern  subjec- 
tivity, which  may  be  called  the  Montaignesque 
element  in  literature.  What  he  designs  is  to  give 
you  himself,  to  acquaint  you  with  his  likeness  ;  but 
must  do  this,  if  at  all,  indirectly,  being  indeed  always 
more  or  less  reserved,  for  himself  and  his  friends  ; 
friendship  counting  for  so  much  in  his  life,  that  he 
is  jealous  of  anything  that  might  jar  or  disturb  it, 
even  to  the  length  of  a  sort  of  insincerity,  to  which 
he  assigns  its  quaint  "  praise  " ;  this  lover  of  stage 
plays  significantly  welcoming  a  little  touch  of  the 
artificiality  of  play  to  sweeten  the  intercourse  of 
actual  life. 

And,  in  effect,  a  very  delicate  and  expressive 
portrait  of  him  does  put  itself  together  for  the  duly 
meditative  reader.  In  indirect  touches  of  his  own 
work,  scraps  of  faded  old  letters,  what  others  remem- 
bered of  his  talk,  the  man's  likeness  emerges  ;  what 
he  laughed  and  wept  at,  his  sudden  elevations,  and 
longings  after  absent  friends,  his  fine  casuistries  of 
affection  and  devices  to  jog  sometimes,  as  he  says, 
the  lazy  happiness  of  perfect  love,  his  solemn 
moments  of  higher  discourse  with  the  young,  as  they 
came  across  him  on  occasion,  and  went  along  a  little 
way  with  him,  the  sudden,  surprised  apprehension 
of  beauties  in  old  literature,  revealing  anew  the  deep 
soul  of  poetry  in  things,  and  withal  the  pure  spirit  of 


CHARLES  LAMB  121 

fun,  having  its  way  again  ;  laughter,  that  most  short- 
lived of  all  things  (some  of  Shakespeare's  even  being 
grown  hollow)  wearing  well  with  him.  Much  of  all 
this  comes  out  through  his  letters,  which  may  be 
regarded  as  a  department  of  his  essays.  He  is  an 
old-fashioned  letter-writer,  the  essence  of  the  old 
fashion  of  letter-writing  lying,  as  with  true  essay- 
writing,  in  the  dexterous  availing  oneself  of  accident 
and  circumstance,  in  the  prosecution  of  deeper  lines 
of  observation  ;  although,  just  as  with  the  record  of 
his  conversation,  one  loses  something,  in  losing  the 
actual  tones  of  the  stammerer,  still  graceful  in  his 
halting,  as  he  halted  also  in  composition,  composing 
slowly  and  by  fits,  "  like  a  Flemish  painter,"  as  he 
tells  us,  so  "  it  is  to  be  regretted,"  says  the  editor  of 
his  letters,  "  that  in  the  printed  letters  the  reader 
will  lose  the  curious  varieties  of  writing  with  which 
the  originals  abound,  and  which  are  scrupulously 
adapted  to  the  subject." 

Also,  he  was  a  true  "  collector,"  delighting  in  the 
personal  finding  of  a  thing,  in  the  colour  an  old  book 
or  print  gets  for  him  by  the  little  accidents  which 
attest  previous  ownership.  Wither's  Emblems,  "  that 
old  book  and  quaint,"  long-desired,  when  he  finds  it 
at  last,  he  values  none  the  less  because  a  child  had 
coloured  the  plates  with  his  paints.  A  lover  of 
household    warmth    everywhere,    of    that    tempered 


122  APPRECIA  TIONS 

atmosphere  which  our  various  habitations  get  by 
men's  living  within  them,  he  "  sticks  to  his  favourite 
books  as  he  did  to  his  friends,"  and  loved  the 
"  town,"  with  a  jealous  eye  for  all  its  characteristics, 
"  old  houses  "  coming  to  have  souls  for  him.  The 
yearning  for  mere  warmth  against  him  in  another, 
makes  him  content,  all  through  life,  with  pure 
brotherliness,  "  the  most  kindly  and  natural  species 
of  love,"  as  he  says,  in  place  of  the  passion  of  love. 
Brother  and  sister,  sitting  thus  side  by  side,  have,  of 
course,  their  anticipations  how  one  of  them  must  sit 
at  last  in  the  faint  sun  alone,  and  set  us  speculating, 
as  we  read,  as  to  precisely  what  amount  of  melancholy 
really  accompanied  for  him  the  approach  of  old  age, 
so  steadily  foreseen  ;  make  us  note  also,  with  plea- 
sure, his  successive  wakings  up  to  cheerful  realities, 
out  of  a  too  curious  musing  over  what  is  gone  and 
what  remains,  of  life.  In  his  subtle  capacity  for 
enjoying  the  more  refined  points  of  earth,  of  human 
relationship,  he  could  throw  the  gleam  of  poetry  or 
humour  on  what  seemed  common  or  threadbare  ;  has 
a  care  for  the  sighs,  and  the  weary,  humdrum  pre- 
occupations of  very  weak  people,  down  to  their  little 
pathetic  "  gentilities,"  even  ;  while,  in  the  purely 
human  temper,  he  can  write  of  death,  almost  like 
Shakespeare. 

And    that   care,  through    all    his   enthusiasm    of 


'    .  CHARLES  LAMB  123 

discovery,  for  what  is  accustomed,  in  literature,  con- 
nected thus  with  his  close  clinging  to  home  and  the 
earth,  was  congruous  also  with  that  love  for  the 
accustomed  in  religion,  which  we  may  notice  in  him. 
He  is  one  of  the  last  votaries  of  that  old-world  senti- 
ment, based  on  the  feelings  of  hope  and  awe,  which 
may  be  described  as  the  religion  of  men  of  letters 
(as  Sir  Thomas  Browne  has  his  Religion  of  tlie 
Physician)  religion  as  understood  by  the  soberer  men 
of  letters  in  the  last  century,  Addison,  Gray,  and 
Johnson  ;  by  Jane  Austen  and  Thackeray,  later.  A 
high  way  of  feeling  developed  largely  by  constant 
intercourse  with  the  great  things  of  literature,  and 
extended  in  its  turn  to  those  matters  greater  still,  this 
religion  lives,  in  the  main  retrospectively,  in  a  system 
of  received  sentiments  and  beliefs  ;  received,  like  those 
great  things  of  literature  and  art,  in  the  first  instance, 
on  the  authority  of  a  long  tradition,  in  the  course  of 
which  they  have  linked  themselves  in  a  thousand 
complex  ways  to  the  conditions  of  human  life,  and 
no  more  questioned  now  than  the  feeling  one  keeps 
by  one  of  the  greatness — say  !  of  Shakespeare.  For 
Charles  Lamb,  such  form  of  religion  becomes  the 
solemn  background  on  which  the  nearer  and  more 
exciting  objects  of  his  immediate  experience  relieve 
themselves,  borrowing  from  it  an  expression  of  calm  ; 
its  necessary  atmosphere   being  indeed  a  profound 


1 24  APPRECIA  TIONS 

quiet,  that  quiet  which  has  in  it  a  kind  of  sacramental 
efficacy,  working,  we  might  say,  on  the  principle  of 
the  opus  operatum,  almost  without  any  co-operation  of 
one's  own,  towards  the  assertion  of  the  higher  self. 
And,  in  truth,  to  men  of  Lamb's  delicately  attuned 
temperament  mere  physical  stillness  has  its  full 
value ;  such  natures  seeming  to  long  for  it  some- 
times, as  for  no  merely  negative  thing,  with  a  sort  of 
mystical  sensuality. 

The  writings  of  Charles  Lamb  are  an  excellent 
illustration  of  the  value  of  reserve  in  literature. 
Below  his  quiet,  his  quaintness,  his  humour,  and 
what  may  seem  the  slightness,  the  occasional  or 
accidental  character  of  his  work,  there  lies,  as  I  said 
at  starting,  as  in  his  life,  a  genuinely  tragic  element. 
The  gloom,  reflected  at  its  darkest  in  those  hard 
shadows  of  Rosamund  Grey,  is  always  there,  though 
not  always  realised  either  for  himself  or  his  readers, 
and  restrained  always  in  utterance.  It  gives  to  those 
lighter  matters  on  the  surface  of  life  and  literature 
among  which  he  for  the  most  part  moved,  a  wonder- 
ful force  of  expression,  as  if  at  any  moment  these 
slight  words  and  fancies  might  pierce  very  far  into 
the  deeper  soul  of  things.  In  his  writing,  as  in  his 
life,  that  quiet  is  not  the  low-flying  of  one  from  the 
first  drowsy  by  choice,  and  needing  the  prick  of  some 


CHARLES  LAMB  125 

strong  passion  or  worldly  ambition,  to  stimulate  him 
into  all  the  energy  of  which  he  is  capable  ;  but  rather 
the  reaction  of  nature,  after  an  escape  from  fate,  dark 
and  insane  as  in  old  Greek  tragedy,  following  upon 
which  the  sense  of  mere  relief  becomes  a  kind  of 
passion,  as  with  one  who,  having  narrowly  escaped 
earthquake  or  shipwreck,  finds  a  thing  for  grateful 
tears  in  just  sitting  quiet  at  home,  under  the  wall, 
till  the  end  of  days. 

He  felt  the  genius  of  places ;  and  I  sometimes 
think  he  resembles  the  places  he  knew  and  liked  best, 
and  where  his  lot  fell — London,  sixty-five  years  ago, 
with  Covent  Garden  and  the  old  theatres,  and  the 
Temple  gardens  still  unspoiled,  Thames  gliding 
down,  and  beyond  to  north  and  south  the  fields  at 
Enfield  or  Hampton,  to  which,  "  with  their  living 
trees,"  the  thoughts  wander  "  from  the  hard  wood  of 
the  desk  " — fields  fresher,  and  coming  nearer  to  town 
then,  but  in  one  of  which  the  present  writer  remem- 
bers, on  a  brooding  early  summer's  day,  to  have 
heard  the  cuckoo  fdr  the  first  time.  Here,  the 
surface  of  things  is  certainly  humdrum,  the  streets 
dingy,  the  green  places,  where  the  child  goes  a- 
maying,  tame  enough.  But  nowhere  are  things 
more  apt  to  respond  to  the  brighter  weather,  nowhere 
is  there  so  much  difference  between  rain  and  sun- 
shine, nowhere  do   the    clouds    roll    together    more 


126  APPRECIATIONS 

grandly  ;  those  quaint  suburban  pastorals  gathering 
a  certain  quality  of  grandeur  from  the  background 
of  the  great  city,  with  its  weighty  atmosphere,  and 
portent  of  storm  in  the  rapid  light  on  dome  and 
bleached  stone  steeples. 

1878. 


SIR  THOMAS  BROWNE 

English  prose  literature  towards  the  end  of  the 
seventeenth  century,  in  the  hands  of  Dryden  and 
Locke,  was  becoming,  as  that  of  France  had  become 
at  an  earlier  date,  a  matter  of  design  and  skilled 
practice,  highly  conscious  of  itself  as  an  art,  and, 
above  all,  correct.  Up  to  that  time  it  had  been,  on 
the  whole,  singularly  informal  and  unprofessional, 
and  by  no  means  the  literature  of  the  "  man  of 
letters,"  as  we  understand  him.  Certain  great  in- 
stances there  had  been  of  literary  structure  or  archi- 
tecture—  The  Ecclesiastical  Polity,  The  Leviathan 
— but  for  the  most  part  that  earlier  prose  liter- 
ature is  eminently  occasional,  closely  determined 
by  the  eager  practical  aims  of  contemporary  politics 
and  theology,  or  else  due  to  a  man's  own  native 
instinct  to  speak  because  he  cannot  help  speaking. 
Hardly  aware  of  the  habit,  he  likes  talking  to  him- 
self; and  when  he  writes  (still  in  undress)  he  does 
but  take  the  "  friendly  reader "  into  his  confidence. 


128  APPRECIATIONS 

The  type  of  this  literature,  obviously,  is  not  Locke 
or  Gibbon,  but,  above  all  others,  Sir  Thomas  Browne  ; 
as  Jean  Paul  is  a  good  instance  of  it  in  German 
literature,  always  in  its  developments  so  much  later 
than  the  English  ;  and  as  the  best  instance  of  it  in 
French  literature,  in  the  century  preceding  Browne, 
is  Montaigne,  from  whom  indeed,  in  a  great  measure, 
all  those  tentative  writers,  or  essayists,  derive. 

It  was  a  result,  perhaps,  of  the  individualism  and 
liberty  of  personal  development,  which,  even  for  a 
Roman  Catholic,  were  effects  of  the  Reformation, 
that  there  was  so  much  in  Montaigne  of  the  "  subjec- 
tive," as  people  say,  of  the  singularities  of  personal 
character.  Browne,  too,  bookish  as  he  really  is 
claims  to  give  his  readers  a  matter,  "  not  picked  from 
the  leaves  of  any  author,  but  bred  amongst  the  weeds 
and  tares "  of  his  own  brain.  The  faults  of  such 
literature  are  what  we  all  recognise  in  it :  unevenness, 
alike  in  thought  and  style  ;  lack  of  design  ;  and 
caprice — the  lack  of  authority  ;  after  the  full  play  of 
which,  there  is  so  much  to  refresh  one  in  the  reason- 
able transparency  of  Hooker,  representing  thus  early 
the  tradition  of  a  classical  clearness  in  English  liter- 
ature, anticipated  by  Latimer  and  More,  and  to  be 
fulfilled  afterwards  in  Butler  and  Hume.  But  then, 
in  recompense  for  that  looseness  and  whim,  in  Sir 
Thomas    Browne    for    instance,   we    have    in    those 


SIR  THOMAS  BROWNE  129 

"  quaint "  writers,  as  they  themselves  understood  the 
term  (coint,  adorned,  but  adorned  with  all  the  curious 
ornaments  of  their  own  predilection,  provincial  or 
archaic,  certainly  unfamiliar,  and  selected  without 
reference  to  the  taste  or  usages  of  other  people)  the 
charm  of  an  absolute  sincerity,  with  all  the  ingenuous 
and  racy  effect  of  what  is  circumstantial  and  peculiar 
in  their  growth. 

"  The  whole  creation  is  a  mystery  and  particularly  that  of 
man.  At  the  blast  of  His  mouth  were  the  rest  of  the  creatures 
made,  and  at  His  bare  word  they  started  out  of  nothing.  But 
in  the  frame  of  man  He  played  the  sensible  operator,  and 
seemed  not  so  much  to  create  as  to  make  him.  When  He 
had  separated  the  materials  of  other  creatures,  there  conse- 
quently resulted  a  form  and  soul :  but  having  raised  the  walls 
of  man,  He  was  driven  to  a  second  and  harder  creation — of  a 
substance  like  Himself,  an  incorruptible  and  immortal  soul." 

There,  we  have  the  manner  of  Sir  Thomas  Browne, 
in  exact  expression  of  his  mind  ! — minute  and  curious 
in  its  thinking,  but  with  an  effect,  on  the  sudden,  of 
a  real  sublimity  or  depth.  His  style  is  certainly  an 
unequal  one.  It  has  the  monumental  aim  which 
charmed,  and  perhaps  influenced,  Johnson — a  dignity 
that  can  be  attained  only  in  such  mental  calm  as 
follows  long  and  learned  pondering  on  the  high 
subjects  Browne  loves  to  deal  with.  It  has  its 
garrulity,  its  various  levels  of  painstaking,  its  manner- 
ism, pleasant  of  its  kind  or  tolerable,  together  with 


1 30  APPRECIA  TIONS 

much,  to  us  intolerable,  but  of  which  he  was  capable 
on  a  lazy  summer  afternoon  down  at  Norwich.  And 
all  is  so  oddly  mixed,  showing,  in  its  entire  ignorance 
of  self,  how  much  he,  and  the  sort  of  literature  he 
represents,  really  stood  in  need  of  technique,  of  a 
formed  taste  in  literature,  of  a  literary  architecture. 

And  yet  perhaps  we  could  hardly  wish  the  result 
different,  in  him,  any  more  than  in  the  books  of 
Burton  and  Fuller,  or  some  other  similar  writers  of 
that  age — mental  abodes,  we  might  liken,  after  their 
own  manner,  to  the  little  old  private  houses  of  some 
historic  town  grouped  about  its  grand  public  struc- 
tures, which,  when  they  have  survived  at  all,  posterity 
is  loth  to  part  with.  For,  in  their  absolute  sincerity, 
not  only  do  these  authors  clearly  exhibit  themselves 
("  the  unique  peculiarity  of  the  writer's  mind,"  being, 
as  Johnson  says  of  Browne,  "  faithfully  reflected  in 
the  form  and  matter  of  his  work ")  but,  even  more 
than  mere  professionally  instructed  writers,  they 
belong  to,  and  reflect,  the  age  they  lived  in.  In 
essentials,  of  course,  even  Browne  is  by  no  means  so 
unique  among  his  contemporaries,  and  so  singular, 
as  he  looks.  And  then,  as  the  very  condition  of 
their  work,  there  is  an  entire  absence  of  personal 
restraint  in  dealing  with  the  public,  whose  humours 
they  come  at  last  in  a  great  measure  to  reproduce. 
To  speak  more  properly,  they  have  no  sense  of  a 


SIR   THOMAS  BROWNE  131 

"  public  "  to  deal  with,  at  all — only  a  full  confidence 
in  the  "  friendly  reader,"  as  they  love  to  call  him. 
Hence  their  amazing  pleasantry,  their  indulgence  in 
their  own  conceits  ;  but  hence  also  those  unpremedi- 
tated wildflowers  of  speech  we  should  never  have  the 
good  luck  to  find  in  any  more  formal  kind  of 
literature. 

It  is,  in  truth,  to  the  literary  purpose  of  the 
humourist,  in  the  old-fashioned  sense  of  the  term, 
that  this  method  of  writing  naturally  allies  itself — 
of  the  humourist  to  whom  all  the  world  is  but  a 
spectacle  in  which  nothing  is  really  alien  from  him- 
self, who  has  hardly  a  sense  of  the  distinction  between 
great  and  little  among  things  that  are  at  all,  and 
whose  half-pitying,  half-amused  sympathy  is  called 
out  especially  by  the  seemingly  small  interests  and 
traits  of  character  in  the  things  or  the  people  around 
him.  Certainly,  in  an  age  stirred  by  great  causes, 
like  the  age  of  Browne  in  England,  of  Montaigne  in 
France,  that  is  not  a  type  to  which  one  would  wish 
to  reduce  all  men  of  letters.  Still,  in  an  age  apt 
also  to  become  severe,  or  even  cruel  (its  eager  interest 
in  those  great  causes  turning  sour  on  occasion)  the 
character  of  the  humourist  may  well  find  its  proper 
influence,,  through  that  serene  power,  and  the  leisure 
it  has  for  conceiving  second  thoughts,  on  the  tenden- 
cies, conscious   or    unconscious,  of   the   fierce  wills 


132  APPRECIATIONS 

around  it.  Something  of  such  a  humourist  was 
Browne — not  callous  to  men  and  their  fortunes ; 
certainly  not  without  opinions  of  his  own  about  them  ; 
and  yet,  undisturbed  by  the  civil  war,  by  the  fall, 
and  then  the  restoration,  of  the  monarchy,  through 
that  long  quiet  life  (ending  at  last  on  the  day  him- 
self had  predicted,  as  if  at  the  moment  he  had  willed) 
in  which  "  all  existence,"  as  he  says,  "  had  been  but 
food  for  contemplation." 

Johnson,  in  beginning  his  Life  of  Browne,  remarks 
that  Browne  "  seems  to  have  had  the  fortune,  common 
among  men  of  letters,  of  raising  little  curiosity  after 
their  private  life."  Whether  or  not,  with  the  example 
of  Johnson  himself  before  us,  we  can  think  just  that, 
it  is  certain  that  Browne's  works  are  of  a  kind  to 
directly  stimulate  curiosity  about  himself — about 
himself,  as  being  manifestly  so  large  a  part  of  those 
works  ;  and  as  a  matter  of  fact  we  know  a  great 
deal  about  his  life,  uneventful  as  in  truth  it  was. 
To  himself,  indeed,  his  life  at  Norwich,  as  he  gives 
us  to  understand,  seemed  wonderful  enough.  "  Of 
these  wonders,"  says  Johnson,  "  the  view  that  can  now 
be  taken  of  his  life  offers  no  appearance."  But  "  we 
carry  with  us,"  as  Browne  writes,  "  the  wonders  we 
seek  without  us,"  and  we  may  note  on  the  other 
hand,  a  circumstance  which  his  daughter,  Mrs. 
Lyttleton,  tells  us  of  his  childhood  :  "  His  father  used 


SIR  THOMAS  BROWNE  133 

to  open  his  breast  when  he  was  asleep,  and  kiss  it  in 
prayers  over  him,  as  'tis  said  of  Origen's  father,  that 
the  Holy  Ghost  would  take  possession  there."  It  was 
perhaps  because  the  son  inherited  an  aptitude  for  a 
like  profound  kindling  of  sentiment  in  the  taking  of 
his  life,  that,  uneventful  as  it  was,  commonplace  as 
it  seemed  to  Johnson,  to  Browne  himself  it  was  so 
full  of  wonders,  and  so  stimulates  the  curiosity  of  his 
more  careful  reader  of  to-day.  "  What  influence,"  says 
Johnson  again,  "learning  has  had  on  its  possessors 
may  be  doubtful."  Well !  the  influence  of  his  great 
learning,  of  his  constant  research  on  Browne,  was  its 
imaginative  influence — that  it  completed  his  outfit 
as  a  poetic  visionary,  stirring  all  the  strange  "conceit " 
of  his  nature  to  its  depths. 

Browne  himself  dwells,  in  connexion  with  the 
first  publication  (extorted  by  circumstance)  of  the 
Religio  Medici,  on  the  natural  "inactivity  of  his 
disposition  " ;  and  he  does,  as  I  have  said,  pass  very 
quietly  through  an  exciting  time.  Born  in  the  year 
of  the  Gunpowder  Plot,  he  was  not,  in  truth,  one  of 
those  clear  and  clarifying  souls  which,  in  an  age  alike 
of  practical  and  mental  confusion,  can  anticipate  and 
lay  down  the  bases  of  reconstruction,  like  Bacon  or 
Hooker.  His  mind  has  much  of  the  perplexity  which 
was  part  of  the  atmosphere  of  the  time.  Not  that 
he  is  without  his  own  definite  opinions  on  events. 

K 


1 34  APPRECIA  TIONS 

For  him,  Cromwell  is  a  usurper,  the  death  of  Charles 
an  abominable  murder.  In  spite  of  what  is  but  an 
affectation,  perhaps,  of  the  sceptical  mood,  he  is  a 
Churchman  too  ;  one  of  those  who  entered  fully  into 
the  Anglican  position,  so  full  of  sympathy  with  those 
ceremonies  and  observances  which  "  misguided  zeal 
terms  superstition,"  that  there  were  some  Roman 
Catholics  who  thought  that  nothing  but  custom  and 
education  kept  him  from  their  communion.  At  the 
Restoration  he  rejoices  to  see  the  return  of  the 
comely  Anglican  order  in  old  episcopal  Norwich,  with 
its  ancient  churches  ;  the  antiquity,  in  particular,  of 
the  English  Church  being,  characteristically,  one  of 
the  things  he  most  valued  in  it,  vindicating  it,  when 
occasion  came,  against  the  "  unjust  scandal  "  of  those 
who  made  that  Church  a  creation  of  Henry  the 
Eighth.  As  to  Romanists — he  makes  no  scruple  to 
"  enter  their  churches  in  defect  of  ours."  He  cannot 
laugh  at,  but  rather  pities,  "  the  fruitless  journeys  of 
pilgrims — for  there  is  something  in  it  of  devotion." 
He  could  never  "  hear  the  Ave  Mary  !  bell  without 
an  oraison"  At  a  solemn  procession  he  has  " wept 
abundantly."  How  English,  in  truth,  all  this  really 
is  !  It  reminds  one  how  some  of  the  most  popular 
of  English  writers,  in  many  a  half-conscious  expres- 
sion, have  witnessed  to  a  susceptibility  in  the  English 
mind  itself,  in  spite  of  the  Reformation,  to  what  is 


SIR  THOMAS  BROWNE  135 

affecting  in  religious  ceremony.  Only,  in  religion  as 
in  politics,  Browne  had  no  turn  for  disputes  ;  was 
suspicious  of  them,  indeed  ;  knowing,  as  he  says  with 
true  acumen,  that  "  a  man  may  be  in  as  just  possession 
of  truth  as  of  a  city,  and  yet  be  forced  to  surrender," 
even  in  controversies  not  necessarily  maladroit — an 
image  in  which  we  may  trace  a  little  contemporary 
colouring. 

„The  Enquiries  into  Vulgar  Errors  appeared  in 
the  year  1646  ;  a  year  which  found  him  very  hard 
on  "  the  vulgar."  His  suspicion,  in  the  abstract,  of 
what  Bacon  calls  Idola  Fori,  the  Idols  of  the  Market- 
place, takes  a  special  emphasis  from  the  course  of 
events  about  him  : — "  being  erroneous  in  their  single 
numbers,  once  huddled  together,  they  will  be  error 
itself."  And  yet,  congruously  with  a  dreamy  sweet- 
ness of  character  we  may  find  expressed  in  his  very 
features,  he  seems  not  greatly  concerned  at  the 
temporary  suppression  of  the  institutions  he  values  so 
much.  He  seems  to  possess  some  inward  Platonic 
reality  of  them — church  or  monarchy — to  hold  by  in 
idea,  quite  beyond  the  reach  of  Roundhead  or 
unworthy  Cavalier.  In  the  power  of  what  is  inward 
and  inviolable  in  his  religion,  he  can  still  take  note : 
"  In  my  solitary  and  retired  imagination  (neque 
enim  cum  porticus  aut  me  lectulus  accepit,  desum  mihi) 
I  remember  I  am  not  alone,  and  therefore  forget  not 


136  APPRECIATIONS 

to  contemplate  Him  and  His  attributes  who  is  ever 
with  me." 

His  father,  a  merchant  of  London,  with  some 
claims  to  ancient  descent,  left  him  early  in  posses- 
sion of  ample  means.  Educated  at  Winchester  and 
Oxford,  he  visited  Ireland,  France,  and  Italy  ;  and  in 
the  year  1633,  at  the  age  of  twenty-eight,  became 
Doctor  of  Medicine  at  Leyden.  Three  years  later 
he  established  himself  as  a  physician  at  Norwich  for 
the  remainder  of  his  life,  having  married  a  lady, 
described  as  beautiful  and  attractive,  and  affectionate 
also,  as  we  may  judge  from  her  letters  and  postscripts 
to  those  of  her  husband,  in  an  orthography  of  a 
homeliness  amazing  even  for  that  age.  Dorothy 
Browne  bore  him  ten  children,  six  of  whom  he  sur- 
vived. 

Their  house  at  Norwich,  even  then  an  old  one  it 
would  seem,  must  have  grown,  through  long  years 
of  acquisition,  into  an  odd  cabinet  of  antiquities — 
antiquities  properly  so  called  ;  his  old  Roman, 
or  Romanised  British  urns,  from  Walsingham  or 
Brampton,  for  instance,  and  those  natural  objects 
which  he  studied  somewhat  in  the  temper  of  a 
curiosity -hunter  or  antiquary.  In  one  of  the  old 
churchyards  of  Norwich  he  makes  the  first  discovery 
of  adipocere,  of  which  grim  substance  "  a  portion  still 
remains  with  him."     For  his  multifarious  experiments 


SIR  THOMAS  BROWNE  137 

he  must  have  had  his  laboratory.  The  old  window- 
stanchions  had  become  magnetic,  proving,  as  he 
thinks,  that  iron  "  acquires  verticity  "  from  long  lying 
in  one  position.  Once  we  find  him  re-tiling  the  place. 
It  was  then,  perhaps,  that  he  made  the  observation 
that  bricks  and  tiles  also  acquire  "  magnetic  allici- 
ency " — one's  whole  house,  one  might  fancy  ;  as 
indeed,  he  holds  the  earth  itself  to  be  a  vast  lode- 
stone. 

The  very  faults  of  his  literary  work,  its  desultori- 
ness,  the  time  it  costs  his  readers,  that  slow  Latinity 
which  Johnson  imitated  from  him,  those  lengthy 
leisurely  terminations  which  busy  posterity  will 
abbreviate,  all  breathe  of  the  long  quiet  of  the  place. 
Yet  he  is  by  no  means  indolent.  Besides  wide 
book-learning,  experimental  research  at  home,  and 
indefatigable  observation  in  the  open  air,  he  prosecutes 
the  ordinary  duties  of  a  physician  ;  contrasting  him- 
self indeed  with  other  students,  "whose  quiet  and 
unmolested  doors  afford  no  such  distractions."  To 
most  persons  of  mind  sensitive  as  his,  his  chosen 
studies  would  have  seemed  full  of  melancholy,  turning 
always,  as  they  did,  upon  death  and  decay.  It  is 
well,  perhaps,  that  life  should  be  something  of  a 
"  meditation  upon  death "  :  but  to  many,  certainly, 
Browne's  would  have  seemed  too  like  a  lifelong 
following  of  one's  own  funeral.     A  museum  is  seldom 


138  APPRECIATIONS 

a  cheerful  place — oftenest  induces  the  feeling  that 
nothing  could  ever  have  been  young  ;  and  to  Browne 
the  whole  world  is  a  museum  ;  all  the  grace  and 
beauty  it  has  being  of  a  somewhat  mortified  kind. 
Only,  for  him  (poetic  dream,  or  philosophic  appre- 
hension, it  was  this  which  never  failed  to  evoke  his 
wonderful  genius  for  exquisitely  impassioned  speech) 
over  all  those  ugly  anatomical  preparations,  as  though 
over  miraculous  saintly  relics,  there  was  the  perpetual 
flicker  of  a  surviving  spiritual  ardency,  one  day  to 
reassert  itself — stranger  far  than  any  fancied  odylic 
gravelights ! 

When  Browne  settled  at  Norwich,  being  then 
about  thirty -six  years  old,  he  had  already  com- 
pleted the  Religio  Medici;  a  desultory  collection  of 
observations  designed  for  himself  only  and  a  few 
friends,  at  all  events  with  no  purpose  of  immediate 
publication.  It  had  been  lying  by  him  for  seven 
years,  circulating  privately  in  his  own  extraordinarily 
perplexed  manuscript,  or  in  manuscript  copies,  when, 
in  1642,  an  incorrect  printed  version  from  one  of 
those  copies,  "  much  corrupted  by  transcription  at 
various  hands,"  appeared  anonymously.  Browne, 
decided  royalist  as  he  was  in  spite  of  seeming 
indifference,  connects  this  circumstance  with  the 
unscrupulous  use  of  the  press  for  political  purposes, 
and  especially  against  the  king,  at  that  time.     Just 


SIR  THOMAS  BROWNE  139 

here  a  romantic  figure  comes  on  the  scene.  Son  of 
the  unfortunate  young  Everard  Digby  who  perished 
on  the  scaffold  for  some  half-hearted  participation 
in  the  gunpowder  plot,  Kenelm  Digby,  brought  up 
in  the  reformed  religion,  had  returned  in  manhood 
to  the  religion  of  his  father.  In  his  intellectual 
composition  he  had,  in  common  with  Browne,  a 
scientific  interest,  oddly  tinged  with  both  poetry  and 
scepticism  :  he  had  also  a  strong  sympathy  with 
religious  reaction,  and  a  more  than  sentimental  love 
for  a  seemingly  vanishing  age  of  faith,  which  he,  for 
one,  would  not  think  of  as  vanishing.  A  copy  of 
that  surreptitious  edition  of  the  Religio  Medici 
found  him  a  prisoner  on  suspicion  of  a  too  active 
royalism,  and  with  much  time  on  his  hands.  The 
Roman  Catholic,  although,  secure  in  his  definite 
orthodoxy,  he  finds  himself  indifferent  on  many 
points  (on  the  reality  of  witchcraft,  for  instance) 
concerning  which  Browne's  more  timid,  personally 
grounded  faith  might  indulge  no  scepticism,  forced 
himself,  nevertheless,  to  detect  a  vein  of  rationalism 
in  a  book  which  on  the  whole  much  attracted  him, 
and  hastily  put  forth  his  "  animadversions  "  upon  it. 
Browne,  with  all  his  distaste  for  controversy,  thus 
found  himself  committed  to  a  dispute,  and  his  reply 
came  with  the  correct  edition  of  the  Religio  Medici 
published  at  last  with  his  name.     There  have  been 


140  APPRECIATIONS 

many  efforts  to  formulate  the  "  religion  of  the 
layman,"  which  might  be  rightly  understood,  perhaps, 
as  something  more  than  what  is  called  "  natural," 
yet  less  than  ecclesiastical,  or  "  professional  "  religion. 
Though  its  habitual  mode  of  conceiving  experience 
is  on  a  different  plane,  yet  it  would  recognise  the 
legitimacy  of  the  traditional  religious  interpretation  of 
that  experience,  generally  and  by  implication  ;  only, 
with  a  marked  reserve  as  to  religious  particulars,  both 
of  thought  and  language,  out  of  a  real  reverence  or 
awe,  as  proper  only  for  a  special  place.  Such  is  the 
lay  religion,  as  we  may  find  it  in  Addison,  in  Gray, 
in  Thackeray  ;  and  there  is  something  of  a  conces- 
sion— a  concession,  on  second  thoughts — about  it. 
Browne's  Religio  Medici  is  designed  as  the  expres- 
sion of  a  mind  more  difficult  of  belief  than  that  of 
the  mere  "  layman,"  as  above  described  ;  it  is  meant 
for  the  religion  of  the  man  of  science.  Actually,  it 
is  something  less  to  the  point,  in  any  balancing  of 
the  religious  against  the  worldly  view  of  things,  than 
the  religion  of  the  layman,  as  just  now  defined.  For 
Browne,  in  spite  of  his  profession  of  boisterous 
doubt,  has  no  real  difficulties,  and  his  religion, 
certainly,  nothing  of  the  character  of  a  concession. 
He  holds  that  there  has  never  existed  an  atheist. 
Not  that  he  is  credulous  ;  but  that  his  religion  is 
only  the  correlative  of  himself,  his  peculiar  character 


SIR  THOMAS  BROWNE  141 

and  education,  a  religion  of  manifold  association. 
For  him,  the  wonders  of  religion,  its  supernatural 
events  or  agencies,  are  almost  natural  facts  or 
processes.  "  Even  in  this  material  fabric,  the  spirits 
walk  as  freely  exempt  from  the  affection  of  time, 
place  and  motion,  as  beyond  the  extremest  circum- 
ference." Had  not  Divine  interference  designed  to 
raise  the  dead,  nature  herself  is  in  act  to  do  it — to 
lead  out  the  "  incinerated  "  soul  from  the  retreats  of 
her  dark  laboratory.  Certainly  Browne  has  not, 
like  Pascal,  made  the  "  great  resolution,"  by  the 
apprehension  that  it  is  just  in  the  contrast  of  the 
moral  world  to  the  world  with  which  science  deals 
that  religion  finds  its  proper  basis.  It  is  from  the 
homelessness  of  the  world  which  science  analyses 
so  victoriously,  its  dark  unspirituality,  wherein  the 
soul  he  is  conscious  of  seems  such  a  stranger,  that 
Pascal  "  turns  again  to  his  rest,"  in  the  conception 
of  a  world  of  wholly  reasonable  and  moral  agencies. 
For  Browne,  on  the  contrary,  the  light  is  full,  design 
everywhere  obvious,  its  conclusion  easy  to  draw, 
all  small  and  great  things  marked  clearly  with 
the  signature  of  the  "Word."  The  adhesion,  the 
difficult  adhesion,  of  men  such  as  Pascal,  is  an 
immense  contribution  to  religious  controversy  ;  the 
concession,  again,  of  a  man  like  Addison,  of  great 
significance  there.     But  in  the  adhesion  of  Browne, 


142  APPRECIATIONS 

in  spite  of  his  crusade  against  "  vulgar  errors,"  there 
is  no  real  significance.  The  Religio  Medici  is  a 
contribution,  not  to  faith,  but  to  piety  ;  a  refinement 
and  correction,  such  as  piety  often  stands  in  need 
of;  a  help,  not  so  much  to  religious  belief  in  a 
world  of  doubt,  as  to  the  maintenance  of  the 
religious  mood  amid  the  interests  of  a  secular 
calling. 

From  about  this  time  Browne's  letters  afford  a 
pretty  clear  view  of  his  life  as  it  passed  in  the  house 
at  Norwich.  Many  of  these  letters  represent  him 
in  correspondence  with  the  singular  men  who  shared 
his  own  half  poetic,  half  scientific  turn  of  mind,  with 
that  impressibility  towards  what  one  might  call  the 
thaumaturgic  elements  in  nature  which  has  often 
made  men  dupes,  and  which  is  certainly  an  element 
in  the  somewhat  atrabiliar  mental  complexion  of 
that  age  in  England.  He  corresponds  seriously 
with  William  Lily,  the  astrologer ;  is  acquainted 
with  Dr.  Dee,  who  had  some  connexion  with 
Norwich,  and  has  "  often  heard  him  affirm,  some- 
times with  oaths,  that  he  had  seen  transmutation  of 
pewter  dishes  and  flagons  into  silver  (at  least) 
which  the  goldsmiths  at  Prague  bought  of  him." 
Browne  is  certainly  an  honest  investigator ;  but  it  is 
still  with  a  faint  hope  of  something  like  that  upon 
fitting  occasion,  and  on  the  alert  always  for  surprises 


SIR  THOMAS  BROWNE  143 

in  nature  (as  if  nature  had  a  rhetoric,  at  times,  to 
deliver  to  us,  like  those  sudden  and  surprising 
flowers  of  his  own  poetic  style)  that  he  listens  to  her 
everyday  talk  so  attentively.  Of  strange  animals, 
strange  cures,  and  the  like,  his  correspondence  is 
full.  The  very  errors  he  combats  are,  of  course, 
the  curiosities  of  error — those  fascinating,  irresistible, 
popular,  errors,  which  various  kinds  of  people  have 
insisted  on  gliding  into  because  they  like  them. 
Even  his  heresies  were  old  ones — the  very  fossils  of 
capricious  opinion. 

It  is  as  an  industrious  local  naturalist  that 
Browne  comes  before  us  first,  full  of  the  fantastic 
minute  life  in  the  fens  and  "  Broads "  around 
Norwich,  its  various  sea  and  marsh  birds.  He  is 
something  of  a  vivisectionist  also,  and  we  may  not 
be  surprised  at  it,  perhaps,  in  an  age  which,  for  the 
propagation  of  truth,  was  ready  to  cut  off  men's  ears. 
He  finds  one  day  " a  Scarabceus  capricornus  odoratus" 
which  he  takes  "  to  be  mentioned  by  Monfetus,  folio 
150.  He  saith,  '  Nucem  moschatam  et  cinnamomum 
vere  spirat ' — but  to  me  it  smelt  like  roses,  santalum, 
and  ambergris."  "  Musca  tuliparum  mosc/iata,"  again, 
"is  a  small  bee-like  fly  of  an  excellent  fragrant 
odour,  which  I  have  often  found  at  the  bottom  of 
the  flowers  of  tulips."  Is  this  within  the  experience 
of  modern  entomologists  ? 


144  APPRECIATIONS 

The  Garden  of  Cyrus,  though  it  ends  indeed 
with  a  passage  of  wonderful  felicity,  certainly 
emphasises  (to  say  the  least)  the  defects  of  Browne's 
literary  good  qualities.  His  chimeric  fancy  carries 
him  here  into  a  kind  of  frivolousness,  as  if  he  felt 
almost  too  safe  with  his  public,  and  were  himself  not 
quite  serious,  or  dealing  fairly  with  it ;  and  in  a 
writer  such  as  Browne  levity  must  of  necessity  be 
a  little  ponderous.  Still,  like  one  of  those  stiff 
gardens,  half-way  between  the  medieval  garden  and 
the  true  "  English "  garden  of  Temple  or  Walpole, 
actually  to  be  seen  in  the  background  of  some  of 
the  conventional  portraits  of  that  day,  the  fantasies 
of  this  indescribable  exposition  of  the  mysteries  of 
the  quincunx  form  part  of  the  complete  portrait  of 
Browne  himself ;  and  it  is  in  connexion  with  it 
that,  once  or  twice,  the  quaintly  delightful  pen  of 
Evelyn  comes  into  the  correspondence — in  con- 
nexion with  the  "  hortulane  pleasure."  "  Norwich," 
he  writes  to  Browne,  "  is  a  place,  I  understand,  much 
addicted  to  the  flowery  part."  Professing  himself  a 
believer  in  the  operation  "  of  the  air  and  genius  of 
gardens  upon  human  spirits,  towards  virtue  and 
sanctity,"  he  is  all  for  natural  gardens  as  against 
"  those  which  appear  like  gardens  of  paste-board  and 
march-pane,  and  smell  more  of  paint  than  of  flowers 
and   verdure."       Browne    is   in   communication  also 


SIX  THOMAS  BROWNE  145 

with  Ashmole  and  Dugdale,  the  famous  antiquaries  ; 
to  the  latter  of  whom,  who  had  written  a  work  on 
the  history  of  the  embanking  of  fens,  he  communi- 
cates the  discovery  of  certain  coins,  on  a  piece  of 
ground  "  in  the  nature  of  an  island  in  the  fens." 

Far  more  interesting  certainly  than  those  curious 
scientific  letters  is  Browne's  "  domestic  correspond- 
ence." Dobson,  Charles  the  First's  "English  Tin- 
toret,"  would  seem  to  have  painted  a  life-sized  picture 
of  Sir  Thomas  Browne  and  his  family,  after  the 
manner  of  those  big,  urbane,  family  groups,  then 
coming  into  fashion  with  the  Dutch  Masters.  Of 
such  a  portrait  nothing  is  now  known.  But  in  these 
old-fashioned,  affectionate  letters,  transmitted  often, 
in  those  troublous  times,  with  so  much  difficulty,  we 
have  what  is  almost  as  graphic — a  numerous  group, 
in  which,  although  so  many  of  Browne's  children  died 
young,  he  was  happy ;  with  Dorothy  Browne,  occa- 
sionally adding  her  charming,  ill-spelt  postscripts  to 
her  husband's  letters  ;  the  religious  daughter  who 
goes  to  daily  prayers  after  the  Restoration,  which 
brought  Browne  the  honour  of  knighthood  ;  and, 
above  all,  two  Toms,  son  and  grandson  of  Sir 
Thomas,  the  latter  being  the  son  of  Dr.  Edward 
Browne,  now  become  distinguished  as  a  physician  in 
London  (he  attended  John,  Earl  of  Rochester,  in  his 
last  illness  at  Woodstock)  and  his  childish  existence 


146  APPRECIATIONS 

as  he  lives  away  from  his  proper  home  in  London, 
in  the  old  house  at  Norwich,  two  hundred  years  ago, 
we  see  like  a  thing  of  to-day. 

At  first  the  two  brothers,  Edward  and  Thomas 
(the  elder)  are  together  in  everything.  Then  Edward 
goes  abroad  for  his  studies,  and  Thomas,  quite  early, 
into  the  navy,  where  he  certainly  develops  into  a 
wonderfully  gallant  figure  ;  passing  away,  however, 
from  the  correspondence,  it  is  uncertain  how,  before 
he  was  of  full  age.  From  the  first  he  is  understood 
to  be  a  lad  of  parts.  "If  you  practise  to  write,  you 
will  have  a  good  pen  and  style  : "  and  a  delightful, 
boyish  journal  of  his  remains,  describing  a  tour  the 
two  brothers  made  in  September  1662  among  the 
Derbyshire  hills.  "  I  received  your  two  last  letters," 
he  writes  to  his  father  from  aboard  the  Marie  Rose, 
"  and  give  you  many  thanks  for  the  discourse  you 
sent  me  out  of  Vossius  :  De  motu  marium  et  ventorum. 
It  seemed  very  hard  to  me  at  first  ;  but  I  have  now 
beaten  it,  and  I  wish  I  had  the  book."  His  father 
is  pleased  to  think  that  he  is  "  like  to  proceed  not 
only  a  good  navigator,  but  a  good  scholar  "  :  and  he 
finds  the  much  exacting,  old  classical  prescription  for 
the  character  of  the  brave  man  fulfilled  in  him.  On 
1 6th  July  1666  the  young  man  writes — still  from 
the  Marie  Rose — 

"If  it  were  possible  to  get  an  opportunity  to  send  as  often 


SIX  THOMAS  BROWNE  147 

as  I  am  desirous  to  write,  you  should  hear  more  often  from  me, 
being  now  so  near  the  grand  action,  from  which  I  would  by 
no  means  be  absent.  I  extremely  long  for  that  thundering 
day  :  wherein  I  hope  you  shall  hear  we  have  behaved  ourselves 
like  men,  and  to  the  honour  of  our  country.  I  thank  you  for 
your  directions  for  my  ears  against  the  noise  of  the  guns,  but  I 
have  found  that  I  could  endure  it ;  nor  is  it  so  intolerable  as 
most  conceive ;  especially  when  men  are  earnest,  and  intent 
upon  their  business,  unto  whom  muskets  sound  but  like  pop- 
guns. It  is  impossible  to  express  unto  another  how  a  smart 
sea-fight  elevates  the  spirits  of  a  man,  and  makes  him  despise 
all  dangers.  In  and  after  all  sea-fights,  I  have  been  very 
thirsty." 

He  died,  as  I  said,  early  in  life.  We  only  hear 
of  him  later  in  connexion  with  a  trait  of  character 
observed  in  Tom  the  grandson,  whose  winning  ways, 
and  tricks  of  bodily  and  mental  growth,  are  duly  re- 
corded in  these  letters  :  the  reader  will,  I  hope,  pardon 
the  following  extracts  from  them  : — 

"  Little  Tom  is  lively.  .  .  .  Frank  is  fayne  sometimes  to 
play  him  asleep  with  a  fiddle.  When  we  send  away  our  letters 
he  scribbles  a  paper  and  will  have  it  sent  to  his  sister,  and 
saith  she  doth  not  know  how  many  fine  things  there  are  in 
Norwich.  .  .  .  He  delights  his  grandfather  when  he  comes 
home." 

"  Tom  gives  you  many  thanks  for  his  clothes  "  (from  London). 
"He  has  appeared  very  fine  this  King's  day  with  them." 

"  Tom  presents  his  duty.  A  gentleman  at  our  election 
asked  Tom  who  hee  was  for  ?  and  he  answered,  '  For  all  four.' 
The  gentleman  replied  that  he  answered  like  a  physician's  son.' 


148  APPRECIATIONS 

"Tom  would  have  his  grandmother,  his  aunt  Betty,  and 
Frank,  valentines :  but  hee  conditioned  with  them  that  they 
should  give  him  nothing  of  any  kind  that  hee  had  ever  had  or 
seen  before." 

"Tom  is  just  now  gone  to  see  two  bears  which  are  to 
be  shown."  "  Tom,  his  duty.  He  is  begging  books  and 
reading  of  them."  "  The  players  are  at  the  Red  Lion  hard  by  ; 
and  Tom  goes  sometimes  to  see  a  play." 

And  then  one  day  he  stirs  old  memories — 

"  The  fairings  were  welcome  to  Tom.  He  finds  about  the 
house  divers  things  that  were  your  brother's "  (the  late 
Edward's),  "  and  Betty  sometimes  tells  him  stories  about  him, 
so  that  he  was  importunate  with  her  to  write  his  life  in  a  quarter 
of  a  sheet  of  paper,  and  read  it  unto  him,  and  will  have  still 
some  more  added." 

"Just  as  I  am  writing"  (learnedly  about  a  comet,  7th 
January  1680-81)  "Tom  comes  and  tells  me  the  blazing  star  is 
in  the  yard,  and  calls  me  to  see  it.  It  was  but  dim,  and  the 
sky  not  clear.   ...   I  am  very  sensible  of  this  sharp  weather." 

He  seems  to  have  come  to  no  good  end,  riding 
forth  one  stormy  night.     Requiescat  in  pace  I 

Of  this  long,  leisurely  existence  the  chief  events 
were  Browne's  rare  literary  publications  ;  some  of 
his  writings  indeed  having  been  left  unprinted  till 
after  his  death  ;  while  in  the  circumstances  of  the 
issue  of  every  one  of  them  there  is  something  acci- 
dental, as  if  the  world  might  have  missed  it  altogether. 
Even  the  Discourse  of  Vulgar  Errors,  the  longest 
and  most  elaborate  of  his  works,  is  entirely  discur- 


SIR  THOMAS  BROWNE  149 

sive  and  occasional,  coming  to  an  end  with  no  natural 
conclusion,  but  only  because  the  writer  chose  to  leave 
off  just  there  ;  and  few  probably  have  been  the  readers 
of  the  book  as  a  consecutive  whole.  At  times  in- 
deed we  seem  to  have  in  it  observations  only,  or 
notes,  preliminary  to  some  more  orderly  composition. 
Dip  into  it :  read,  for  instance,  the  chapter  "  Of  the 
Ring-finger,"  or  the  chapters  "  Of  the  Long  Life  of 
the  Deer,"  and  on  the  "  Pictures  of  Mermaids,  Uni- 
corns, and  some  Others,"  and  the  part  will  certainly 
seem  more  than  the  whole.  Try  to  read  it  through, 
and  you  will  soon  feel  cloyed  ; — miss  very  likely,  its 
real  worth  to  the  fancy,  the  literary  fancy  (which 
finds  its  pleasure  in  inventive  word  and  phrase)  and 
become  dull  to  the  really  vivid  beauties  of  a  book  so 
lengthy,  but  with  no  real  evolution.  Though  there 
are  words,  phrases,  constructions  innumerable,  which 
remind  one  how  much  the  work  initiated  in  France 
by  Madame  de  Rambouillet — work,  done  for  England, 
we  may  think  perhaps  imperfectly,  in  the  next  century 
by  Johnson  and  others — was  really  needed  ;  yet  the 
capacities  of  Browne's  manner  of  writing,  coming  as 
it  did  so  directly  from  the  man,  are  felt  even  in  his 
treatment  of  matters  of  science.  As  with  Buffon, 
his  full,  ardent,  sympathetic  vocabulary,  the  poetry 
of  his  language,  a  poetry  inherent  in  its  elementary 
particles — the  word,  the  epithet — helps  to  keep  his 

L 


1 50  APPRECIA  TIONS 

eye,  and  the  eye  of  the  reader,  on  the  object  before 
it,  and  conduces  directly  to  the  purpose  of  the 
naturalist,  the  observer. 

But,  only  one  half  observation,  its  other  half 
consisting  of  very  out-of-the-way  book-lore,  this 
work  displays  Browne  still  in  the  character  of  the 
antiquary,  as  that  age  understood  him.  He  is  a  kind 
of  Elias  Ashmole,  but  dealing  with  natural  objects  ; 
which  are  for  him,  in  the  first  place,  and  apart  from 
the  remote  religious  hints  and  intimations  they  carry 
with  them,  curiosities.  He  seems  to  have  no  true 
sense  of  natural  law,  as  Bacon  understood  it ;  nor 
even  of  that  immanent  reason  in  the  natural  world, 
which  the  Platonic  tradition  supposes.  "  Things  are 
really  true,"  he  says,  "  as  they  correspond  unto  God's 
conception ;  and  have  so  much  verity  as  they  hold 
of  conformity  unto  that  intellect,  in  whose  idea  they 
had  their  first  determinations."  But,  actually,  what 
he  is  busy  in  the  record  of,  are  matters  more  or  less 
of  the  nature  of  caprices  ;  as  if  things,  after  all, 
were  significant  of  their  higher  verity  only  at  random, 
and  in  a  sort  of  surprises,  like  music  in  old  instru- 
ments suddenly  touched  into  sound  by  a  wandering 
finger,  among  the  lumber  of  people's  houses.  Nature, 
"  the  art  of  God,"  as  he  says,  varying  a  little  a 
phrase  used  also  by  Hobbes,  in  a  work  printed  later 
— Nature,  he  seems  to  protest,  is  only  a  little  less 


SIX  THOMAS  BROWNE  151 

magical,  its  processes  only  a  little  less  in  the  way  of 
alchemy,  than  you  had  supposed.  We  feel  that,  as 
with  that  disturbed  age  in  England  generally  (and 
it  is  here  that  he,  with  it,  is  so  interesting,  curious, 
old-world,  and  unlike  ourselves)  his  supposed  ex- 
perience might  at  any  moment  be  broken  in  upon 
by  a  hundred  forms  of  a  natural  magic,  only  not 
quite  so  marvellous  as  that  older  sort  of  magic,  or 
alchemy,  he  is  at  so  much  pains  to  expose  ;  and  the 
large  promises  of  which,  its  large  words  too,  he  still 
regretfully  enjoys. 

And  yet  the  Discourse  of  Vulgar  Errors,  seem- 
ing, as  it  often  does,  to  be  a  serious  refutation  of 
fairy  tales — arguing,  for  instance,  against  the  literal 
truth  of  the  poetic  statement  that  "  The  pigeon  hath 
no  gall,"  and  such  questions  as  "  Whether  men  weigh 
heavier  dead  than  alive?"  being  characteristic  ques- 
tions— is  designed,  with  much  ambition,  under  its 
pedantic  Greek  title  Psendodoxia  Epidemica,  as  a 
criticism,  a  cathartic,  an  instrument  for  the  clarifying 
of  the  intellect.  He  begins  from  "  that  first  error  in 
Paradise,"  wondering  much  at  "  man's  deceivability 
in  his  perfection," — "at  such  gross  deceit."  He 
enters  in  this  connexion,  with  a  kind  of  poetry  of 
scholasticism  which  may  interest  the  student  of 
Paradise  Lost,  into  what  we  may  call  the  intellectual 
and  moral  by-play  of  the  situation  of  the  first  man 


1 5  2  APPRECIA  TIONS 

and  woman  in  Paradise,  with  strange  queries  about 
it.  Did  Adam,  for  instance,  already  know  of  the 
fall  of  the  Angels  ?  Did  he  really  believe  in  death, 
till  Abel  died  ?  It  is  from  Julius  Scaliger  that  he 
takes  his  motto,  to  the  effect  that  the  true  knowledge 
of  things  must  be  had  from  things  themselves,  not 
from  books  ;  and  he  seems  as  seriously  concerned  as 
Bacon  to  dissipate  the  crude  impressions  of  a  false 
"  common  sense,"  of  false  science,  and  a  fictitious 
authority.  Inverting,  oddly,  Plato's  theory  that  all 
learning  is  but  reminiscence,  he  reflects  with  a  sigh 
how  much  of  oblivion  must  needs  be  involved  in  the 
getting  of  any  true  knowledge.  "  Men  that  adore 
times  past,  consider  not  that  those  times  were  once 
present  (that  is,  as  our  own  are)  and  ourselves  unto 
those  to  come,  as  they  unto  us  at  present."  That, 
surely,  coming  from  one  both  by  temperament  and 
habit  so  great  an  antiquary,  has  the  touch  of  some- 
thing like  an  influence  in  the  atmosphere  of  the 
time.  That  there  was  any  actual  connexion  between 
Browne's  work  and  Bacon's  is  but  a  surmise.  Yet 
we  almost  seem  to  hear  Bacon  when  Browne  dis- 
courses on  the  "  use  of  doubts,  and  the  advantages 
which  might  be  derived  from  drawing  up  a  calendar 
of  doubts,  falsehoods,  and  popular  errors  ;"  and,  as 
from  Bacon,  one  gets  the  impression  that  men  really 
have   been   very   much   the   prisoners    of  their   own 


SIR   THOMAS  BROWNE  153 

crude  or  pedantic  terms,  notions,  associations  ;  that 
they  have  been  very  indolent  in  testing  very  simple 
matters — with  a  wonderful  kind  of  "  supinity,"  as  he 
calls  it.  In  Browne's  chapter  on  the  "  Sources  of 
Error,"  again,  we  may  trace  much  resemblance  to 
Bacon's  striking  doctrine  of  the  Idola,  the  "  shams  " 
men  fall  down  and  worship.  Taking  source  respect- 
ively, from  the  "  common  infirmity  of  human  nature," 
from  the  "erroneous  disposition  of  the  people,"  from 
"confident  adherence  to  authority,"  the  errors  which 
Browne  chooses  to  deal  with  may  be  registered  as 
identical  with  Bacon's  Idola  Tribus,  Fori,  Theatri ; 
the  idols  of  our  common  human  nature ;  of  the 
vulgar,  when  they  get  together  ;  and  of  the  learned, 
when  they  get  together. 

But  of  the  fourth  species  of  error  noted  by  Bacon, 
the  Idola  Specus,  the  Idols  of  the  Cave,  that  whole 
tribe  of  illusions,  which  are  "  bred  amongst  the  weeds 
and  tares  of  one's  own  brain,"  Browne  tells  us  nothing 
by  way  of  criticism  ;  was  himself,  rather,  a  lively 
example  of  their  operation.  Throw  those  illu- 
sions, those  "  idols,"  into  concrete  or  personal  form, 
suppose  them  introduced  among  the  other  forces  of 
an  active  intellect,  and  you  have  Sir  Thomas  Browne 
himself.  The  sceptical  inquirer  who  rises  from  his 
cathartic,  his  purging  of  error,  a  believer  in  the 
supernatural  character  of  pagan  oracles,  and  a  cruel 


1 54  APPRECIA  TIONS 

judge  of  supposed  witches,  must  still  need  as  much 
as  ever  that  elementary  conception  of  the  right 
method  and  the  just  limitations  of  knowledge,  by- 
power  of  which  he  should  not  just  strain  out  a  single 
error  here  or  there,  but  make  a  final  precipitate  of 
fallacy. 

And  yet  if  the  temperament  had  been  deducted 
from  Browne's  work — that  inherent  and  strongly 
marked  way  of  deciding  things,  which  has  guided 
with  so  surprising  effect  the  musings  of  the  Letter  to 
a  Friend,  and  the  Urn-Burial — we  should  probably 
have  remembered  him  little.  Pity  !  some  may  think, 
for  himself  at  least,  that  he  had  not  lived  earlier, 
and  still  believed  in  the  mandrake,  for  instance  ;  its 
fondness  for  places  of  execution,  and  its  human  cries 
"on  eradication,  with  hazard  of  life  to  them  that 
pull  it  up."  "  In  philosophy,"  he  observes,  meaning 
to  contrast  his  free-thinking  in  that  department  with 
his  orthodoxy  in  religion — in  philosophy,  "where 
truth  seems  double-faced,  there  is  no  man  more 
paradoxical  than  myself:"  which  is  true,  we  may 
think,  in  a  further  sense  than  he  meant,  and  that  it 
was  the  "  paradoxical "  that  he  actually  preferred. 
Happy,  at  all  events,  he  still  remained — undisturbed 
and  happy — in  a  hundred  native  prepossessions,  some 
certainly  valueless,  some  of  them  perhaps  invaluable. 
And  while  one  feels  that  no  real  logic  of  fallacies  has 


SIR  THOMAS  BROWNE  155 

been  achieved  by  him,  one  feels  still  more  how  little 
the  construction  of  that  branch  of  logical  inquiry 
really  helps  men's  minds  ;  fallacy,  like  truth  itself, 
being  a  matter  so  dependent  on  innate  gift  of  appre- 
hension, so  extra-logical  and  personal ;  the  original 
perception  counting  for  almost  everything,  the  mere 
inference  for  so  little  !  Yes  !  "  A  man  may  be  in  as 
just  possession  of  truth  as  of  a  city,  and  yet  be  forced 
to  surrender,"  even  in  controversies  not  necessarily 
maladroit. 

The  really  stirring  poetry  of  science  is  not  in 
guesses,  or  facile  divinations  about  it,  but  in  its 
larger  ascertained  truths — the  order  of  infinite  space, 
the  slow  method  and  vast  results  of  infinite  time. 
For  Browne,  however,  the  sense  of  poetry  which  so 
overmasters  his  scientific  procedure,  depends  chiefly 
on  its  vaguer  possibilities  ;  the  empirical  philosophy, 
even  after  Bacon,  being  still  dominated  by  a  temper, 
resultant  from  the  general  unsettlement  of  men's 
minds  at  the  Reformation,  which  may  be  summed 
up  in  the  famous  question  of  Montaigne — Que 
sqais-je  ?  The  cold-blooded  method  of  observation 
and  experiment  was  creeping  but  slowly  over  the 
domain  of  science  ;  and  such  unreclaimed  portions 
of  it  as  the  phenomena  of  magnetism  had  an 
immense  fascination  for  men  like  Browne  and  Digby. 
Here,  in  those  parts  of  natural  philosophy  "  but  yet 


1 56  APPRECIA  TIONS 

in  discovery,"  "  the  America  and  untravelled  parts  of 
truth,"  lay  for  them  the  true  prospect  of  science,  like 
the  new  world  itself  to  a  geographical  discoverer 
such  as  Raleigh.  And  welcome  as  one  of  the 
minute  hints  of  that  country  far  ahead  of  them,  the 
strange  bird,  or  floating  fragment  of  unfamiliar 
vegetation,  which  met  those  early  navigators,  there 
was  a  certain  fantastic  experiment,  in  which,  as  was 
alleged,  Paracelsus  had  been  lucky.  For  Browne 
and  others  it  became  the  crucial  type  of  the  kind  of 
agency  in  nature  which,  as  they  conceived,  it  was  the 
proper  function  of  science  to  reveal  in  larger  opera- 
tion. "  The  subject  of  my  last  letter,"  says  Dr. 
Henry  Power,  then  a  student,  writing  to  Browne  in 
1648,  the  last  year  of  Charles  the  First,  "being  so 
high  and  noble  a  piece  of  chemistry,  invites  me  once 
more  to  request  an  experimental  eviction  of  it  from 
yourself;  and  I  hope  you  will  not  chide  my  impor- 
tunity in  this  petition,  or  be  angry  at  my  so  frequent 
knockings  at  your  door  to  obtain  a  grant  of  so  great 
and  admirable  a  mystery."  What  the  enthusiastic 
young  student  expected  from  Browne,  so  high  and 
noble  a  piece  of  chemistry,  was  the  "  re-individualling 
of  an  incinerated  plant " — a  violet,  turning  to  fresh- 
ness, and  smelling  sweet  again,  out  of  its  ashes, 
under  some  genially  fitted  conditions  of  the  chemic 
art. 


SIS  THOMAS  BROWNE  157 

Palingenesis,  resurrection,  effected  by  orderly  pre- 
scription— the  "  re-individualling  "  of  an  "  incinerated 
organism  " — is  a  subject  which  affords  us  a  natural 
transition  to  the  little  book  of  the  Hydriotaphia, 
or  Treatise  of  Urn- Burial — about  fifty  or  sixty 
pages — which,  together  with  a  very  singular  letter 
not  printed  till  after  Browne's  death,  is  perhaps,  after 
all,  the  best  justification  of  Browne's  literary  reputa- 
tion, as  it  were  his  own  curiously  figured  urn,  and 
treasure-place  of  immortal  memory. 

In  its  first  presentation  to  the  public  this  letter 
was  connected  with  Browne's  Christian  Morals ;  but 
its  proper  and  sympathetic  collocation  would  be 
rather  with  the  Urn-Burial,  of  which  it  is  a  kind 
of  prelude,  or  strikes  the  keynote.  He  is  writing 
in  a  very  complex  situation — to  a  friend,  upon  occa- 
sion of  the  death  of  a  common  friend.  The  deceased 
apparently  had  been  little  known  to  Browne  himself 
till  his  recent  visits,  while  the  intimate  friend  to 
whom  he  is  writing  had  been  absent  at  the  time  ; 
and  the  leading  motive  of  Browne's  letter  is  the  deep 
impression  he  has  received  during  those  visits,  of  a 
sort  of  physical  beauty  in  the  coming  of  death,  with 
which  he  still  surprises  and  moves  his  reader.  There 
had  been,  in  this  case,  a  tardiness  and  reluctancy  in 
the  circumstances  of  dissolution,  which  had  permitted 
him,  in  the  character  of  a  physician,  as  it  were  to  assist 


158  APPRECIA  TIONS 

at  the  spiritualising  of  the  bodily  frame  by  natural 
process  ;  a  wonderful  new  type  of  a  kind  of  mortified 
grace  being  evolved  by  the  way.  The  spiritual  body 
had  anticipated  the  formal  moment  of  death  ;  the 
alert  soul,  in  that  tardy  decay,  changing  its  vesture 
gradually,  and  as  if  piece  by  piece.  The  infinite 
future  had  invaded  this  life  perceptibly  to  the  senses, 
like  the  ocean  felt  far  inland  up  a  tidal  river.  No- 
where, perhaps,  is  the  attitude  of  questioning  awe  on 
the  threshold  of  another  life  displayed  with  the 
expressiveness  of  this  unique  morsel  of  literature ; 
though  there  is  something  of  the  same  kind,  in 
another  than  the  literary  medium,  in  the  delicate 
monumental  sculpture  of  the  early  Tuscan  School,  as 
also  in  many  of  the  designs  of  William  Blake,  often, 
though  unconsciously,  much  in  sympathy  with  those 
unsophisticated  Italian  workmen.  With  him,  as 
with  them,  and  with  the  writer  of  the  Letter  to  a 
Friend  upon  the  occasion  of  the  death  of  his  intimate 
Friend, — so  strangely !  the  visible  function  of  death 
is  but  to  refine,  to  detach  from  aught  that  is  vulgar. 
And  this  elfin  letter,  really  an  impromptu  epistle  to 
a  friend,  affords  the  best  possible  light  on  the  general 
temper  of  the  man  who  could  be  moved  by  the 
accidental  discovery  of  those  old  urns  at  Walsingham 
— funeral  relics  of  "  Romans,  or  Britons  Romanised 
which  had  learned  Roman  customs  " — to  the  composi- 


SIX  THOMAS  BROWNE  159 

tion  of  that  wonderful  book  the  Hydriotaphia.  He 
had  drawn  up  a  short  account  of  the  circumstance  at 
the  moment ;  but  it  was  after  ten  years'  brooding  that 
he  put  forth  the  finished  treatise,  dedicated  to  an 
eminent  collector  of  ancient  coins  and  other  rarities, 
with  congratulations  that  he  "can  daily  command 
the  view  of  so  many  imperial  faces,"  and  (by  way  of 
frontispiece)  with  one  of  the  urns,  "  drawn  with  a  coal 
taken  out  of  it  and  found  among  the  burnt  bones." 
The  discovery  had  resuscitated  for  him  a  whole  world 
of  latent  observation,  from  life,  from  out-of-the-way 
reading,  from  the  natural  world,  and  fused  into  a 
composition,  which  with  all  its  quaintness  we  may 
well  pronounce  classical,  all  the  heterogeneous 
elements  of  that  singular  mind.  The  desire  to 
"record  these  risen  ashes  and  not  to  let  them  be 
buried  twice  among  us,"  had  set  free,  in  his  manner 
of  conceiving  things,  something  not  wholly  analysable, 
something  that  may  be  properly  called  genius,  which 
shapes  his  use  of  common  words  to  stronger  and 
deeper  senses,  in  a  way  unusual  in  prose  writing. 
Let  the  reader,  for  instance,  trace  his  peculiarly 
sensitive  use  of  the  epithets  thin  and  dark,  both  here 
and  in  the  Letter  to  a  Friend. 

Upon  what  a  grand  note  he  can  begin  and  end 
chapter  or  paragraph  ! — "  When  the  funeral  pyre  was 
out,  and  the  last  valediction  over  :" — "  And  a  large 


160  APPRECIATIONS 

part  of  the  earth  is  still  in  the  urn  unto  us." 
Dealing  with  a  very  vague  range  of  feelings,  it  is 
his  skill  to  associate  them  to  very  definite  objects. 
Like  the  Soul,  in  Blake's  design,  "  exploring  the 
recesses  of  the  tomb,"  he  carries  a  light,  the  light  of 
the  poetic  faith  which  he  cannot  put  off  him,  into 
those  dark  places,  "  the  abode  of  worms  and  pismires," 
peering  round  with  a  boundless  curiosity  and  no  fear  ; 
noting  the  various  casuistical  considerations  of  men's 
last  form  of  self-love  ;  all  those  whims  of  humanity 
as  a  "  student  of  perpetuity,"  the  mortuary  customs 
of  all  nations,  which,  from  their  very  closeness  to  our 
human  nature,  arouse  in  most  minds  only  a  strong 
feeling  of  distaste.  There  is  something  congruous 
with  the  impassive  piety  of  the  man  in  his  waiting  on 
accident  from  without  to  take  start  for  the  work, 
which,  of  all  his  work,  is  most  truly  touched  by  the 
"divine  spark."  Delightsome  as  its.  eloquence  is 
actually  found  to  be,  that  eloquence  is  attained  out 
of  a  certain  difficulty  and  halting  crabbedness  of 
expression  ;  the  wretched  punctuation  of  the  piece 
being  not  the  only  cause  of  its  impressing  the  reader 
with  the  notion  that  he  is  but  dealing  with  a  collec- 
tion of  notes  for  a  more  finished  composition,  and  of 
a  different  kind  ;  perhaps  a  purely  erudite  treatise 
on  its  subject,  with  detachment  of  all  personal  colour 
now  adhering  to  it.     Out  of  an  atmosphere  of  all- 


SIR  THOMAS  BROWNE  161 

pervading  oddity  and  quaintness — the  quaintness  of 
mind  which  reflects  that  this  disclosing  of  the  urns 
of  the  ancients  hath  "  left  unto  our  view  some  parts 
which  they  never  beheld  themselves  " — arises  a  work 
really  ample  and  grand,  nay !  classical,  as  I  said,  by 
virtue  of  the  effectiveness  with  which  it  fixes  a  type 
in  literature ;  as,  indeed,  at  its  best,  romantic  litera- 
ture (and  Browne  is  genuinely  romantic)  in  every 
period  attains  classical  quality,  giving  true  measure 
of  the  very  limited  value  of  those  well-worn  critical 
distinctions.  And  though  the  Urn-Burial  certainly 
has  much  of  the  character  of  a  poem,  yet  one  is 
never  allowed  to  forget  that  it  was  designed,  candidly, 
as  a  scientific  treatise  on  one  department  of  ancient 
"  culture "  (as  much  so  as  Guichard's  curious  old 
French  book  on  Divers  Manners  of  Burial)  and  was 
the  fruit  of  much  labour,  in  the  way  especially  of 
industrious  selection  from  remote  and  difficult  writers  ; 
there  being  then  few  or  no  handbooks,  or  anything 
like  our  modern  short-cuts  to  varied  knowledge. 
Quite  unaffectedly,  a  curious  learning  saturates,  with 
a  kind  of  grey  and  aged  colour  most  apt  and  con- 
gruous with  the  subject-matter,  all  the  thoughts  that 
arise,  in  him.  His  great  store  of  reading,  so  freely 
displayed,  he  uses  almost  as  poetically  as  Milton  ; 
like  him,  profiting  often  by  the  mere  sonorous  effect 
of  some  heroic  or  ancient  name,  which  he  can  adapt 


162  APPRECIATIONS 

to  that  same  sort  of  learned  sweetness  of  cadence 
with  which  so  many  of  his  single  sentences  are  made 
to  fall  upon  the  ear. 

Pope  Gregory,  that  great  religious  poet,  requested 
by  certain  eminent  persons  to  send  them  some  of 
those  relics  he  sought  for  so  devoutly  in  all  the 
lurking-places  of  old  Rome,  took  up,  it  is  said,  a 
portion  of  common  earth,  and  delivered  it  to  the 
messengers ;  and,  on  their  expressing  surprise  at 
such  a  gift,  pressed  the  earth  together  in  his  hand, 
whereupon  the  sacred  blood  of  the  Martyrs  was 
beheld  flowing  out  between  his  fingers.  The  venera- 
tion of  relics  became  a  part  of  Christian  (as  some 
may  think  it  a  part  of  natural)  religion.  All  over 
Rome  we  may  count  how  much  devotion  in  fine  art 
is  owing  to  it ;  and,  through  all  ugliness  or  supersti- 
tion, its  intention  still  speaks  clearly  to  serious  minds. 
The  poor  dead  bones,  ghastly  and  forbidding : — we 
know  what  Shakespeare  would  have  felt  about  them. 
— "  Beat  not  the  bones  of  the  buried  :  when  he 
breathed,  he  was  a  man  !  "  And  it  is  with  something 
of  a  similar  feeling  that  Browne  is  full,  on  the  common 
and  general  ground  of  humanity  ;  an  awe -stricken 
sympathy  with  those,  whose  bones  "  lie  at  the  mercies 
of  the  living,"  strong  enough  to  unite  all  his  various 
chords  of  feeling  into  a  single  strain  of  impressive 
and  genuine  poetry.     His  real   interest   is  in  what 


SIR  THOMAS  BROWNE  163 

may  be  called  the  curiosities  of  our  common  humanity. 
As  another  might  be  moved  at  the  sight  of  Alexander's 
bones,  or  Saint  Edmund's,  or  Saint  Cecilia's,  so  he  is 
full  of  a  fine  poetical  excitement  at  such  lowly  relics 
as  the  earth  hides  almost  everywhere  beneath  our  feet. 
But  it  is  hardly  fair  to  take  our  leave  amid  these 
grievous  images  of  so  happy  a  writer  as  Sir  Thomas 
Browne ;  so  great  a  lover  of  .the  open  air,  under 
which  much  of  his  life  was  passed.  His  work,  late 
one  night,  draws  to  a  natural  close  : — "  To  keep  our 
eyes  open  longer,"  he  bethinks  himself  suddenly, 
"were  but  to  act  our  Antipodes.  The  huntsmen 
are  up  in  America!" 

What  a  fund  of  open-air  cheerfulness,  there !  in 
turning  to  sleep.  Still,  even  when  we  are  dealing 
with  a  writer  in  whom  mere  style  counts  for  so  much 
as  with  Browne,  it  is  impossible  to  ignore  his  matter  ; 
and  it  is  with  religion  he  is  really  occupied  from  first 
to  last,  hardly  less  than  Richard  Hooker.  And  his 
religion,  too,  after  all,  was  a  religion  of  cheerfulness  : 
he  has  no  great  consciousness  of  evil  in  things,  and 
is  no  fighter.  His  religion,  if  one  may  say  so,  was 
all  profit  to  him  ;  among  other  ways,  in  securing  an 
absolute  staidness  and  placidity  of  temper,  for  the 
intellectual  work  which  was  the  proper  business  of 
his  life.  His  contributions  to  "  evidence,"  in  the 
Religio  Medici,  for  instance,  hardly  tell,  because  he 


164  APPRECIATIONS 

writes  out  of  view  of  a  really  philosophical  criticism. 
What  does  tell  in  him,  in  this  direction,  is  the  witness 
he  brings  to  men's  instinct  of  survival — the  "  intima- 
tions of  immortality,"  as  Wordsworth  terms  them, 
which  were  natural  with  him  in  surprising  force. 
As  was  said  of  Jean  Paul,  his  special  subject  was 
the  immortality  of  the  soul ;  with  an  assurance  as 
personal,  as  fresh  and  original,  as  it  was,  on  the  one 
hand,  in  those  old  half-civilised  people  who  had 
deposited  the  urns  ;  on  the  other  hand,  in  the  cynical 
French  poet  of  the  nineteenth  century,  who  did  not 
think,  but  knew,  that  his  soul  was  imperishable.  He 
lived  in  an  age  in  which  that  philosophy  made  a 
great  stride  which  ends  with  Hume ;  and  his  lesson, 
if  we  may  be  pardoned  for  taking  away  a  "  lesson" 
from  so  ethical  a  writer,  is  the  force  of  men's  tempera- 
ments in  the  management  of  opinion,  their  own  or 
that  of  others  ; — that  it  is  not  merely  different  degrees 
of  bare  intellectual  power  which  cause  men  to  approach 
in  different  degrees  to  this  or  that  intellectual  pro- 
gramme. Could  he  have  foreseen  the  mature  result 
of  that  mechanical  analysis  which  Bacon  had  applied 
to  nature,  and  Hobbes  to  the  mind  of  man,  there  is 
no  reason  to  think  that  he  would  have  surrendered 
his  own  chosen  hypothesis  concerning  them.  He 
represents,  in  an  age,  the  intellectual  powers  of  which 
tend  strongly  to  agnosticism,  that  class  of  minds  to 


S/R   THOMAS  BROWNE  165 

which  the  supernatural  view  of  things  is  still  credible. 
The  non-mechanical  theory  of  nature  has  had  its 
grave  adherents  since  :  to  the  non-mechanical  theory 
of  man — that  he  is  in  contact  with  a  moral  order  on 
a  different  plane  from  the  mechanical  order — 
thousands,  of  the  most  various  types  and  degrees  of 
intellectual  power,  always  adhere  ;  a  fact  worth  the 
consideration  of  all  ingenuous  thinkers,  if  (as  is 
certainly  the  case  with  colour,  music,  number,  for 
instance)  there  may  be  whole  regions  of  fact,  the 
recognition  of  which  belongs  to  one  and  not  to 
another,  which  people  may  possess  in  various  de- 
grees ;  for  the  knowledge  of  which,  therefore,  one 
person  is  dependent  upon  another  ;  and  in  relation 
to  which  the  appropriate  means  of  cognition  must 
lie  among  the  elements  of  what  we  call  individual 
temperament,  so  that  what  looks  like  a  pre-judgment 
may  be  really  a  legitimate  apprehension.  "Men 
are  what  they  are,"  and  are  not  wholly  at  the  mercy 
of  formal  conclusions  from  their  formally  limited 
premises.  Browne  passes  his  whole  life  in  observa- 
tion and  inquiry  :  he  is  a  genuine  investigator,  with 
every  opportunity :  the  mind  of  the  age  all  around 
him  seems  passively  yielding  to  an  almost  foregone 
intellectual  result,  to  a  philosophy  of  disillusion. 
But  he  thinks  all  that  a  prejudice  ;  and  not  from 
any  want  of  intellectual  power  certainly,  but  from 

M 


166  APPRECIATIONS 

some  inward  consideration,  some  afterthought,  from 
the  antecedent  gravitation  of  his  own  general  char- 
acter— or,  will  you  say?  from  that  unprecipitated 
infusion  of  fallacy  in  him — he  fails  to  draw,  unlike 
almost  all  the  rest  of  the  world,  the  conclusion  ready 
to  hand. 


1886. 


'LOVE'S  LABOURS  LOST' 

Love's  Labours  Lost  is  one  of  the  earliest  of  Shake- 
speare's dramas,  and  has  many  of  the  peculiarities  of 
his  poems,  which  are  also  the  work  of  his  earlier  life. 
The  opening  speech  of  the  king  on  the  immortality 
of  fame — on  the  triumph  of  fame  over  death — and 
the  nobler  parts  of  Biron,  display  something  of  the 
monumental  style  of  Shakespeare's  Sonnets,  and  are 
not  without  their  conceits  of  thought  and  expression. 
This  connexion  of  Love's  Labours  Lost  with  Shake- 
speare's poems  is  further  enforced  by  the  actual  in- 
sertion in  it  of  three  sonnets  and  a  faultless  song ; 
which,  in  accordance  with  his  practice  in  other  plays, 
are  inwoven  into  the  argument  of  the  piece  and,  like 
the  golden  ornaments  of  a  fair  woman,  give  it  a 
peculiar  air  of  distinction.  There  is  merriment  in  it 
also,  with  choice  illustrations  of  both  wit  and  humour  ; 
a  laughter,  often  exquisite,  ringing,  if  faintly,  yet  as 
genuine  laughter  still,  though  sometimes  sinking  into 
mere  burlesque,  which  has  not  lasted  quite  so  well. 


1 68  APPRECIATIONS 

And  Shakespeare  brings  a  serious  effect  out  of  the 
trifling  of  his  characters.  A  dainty  love-making  is 
interchanged  with  the  more  cumbrous  play :  below 
the  many  artifices  of  Biron's  amorous  speeches  we 
may  trace  sometimes  the  "  unutterable  longing;  "  and 
the  lines  in  which  Katherine  describes  the  blighting 
through  love  of  her  younger  sister  are  one  of  the  most 
touching  things  in  older  literature.*  Again,  how 
many  echoes  seem  awakened  by  those  strange  words, 
actually  said  in  jest ! — "  The  sweet  war-man  (Hector 
of  Troy)  is  dead  and  rotten  ;  sweet  chucks,  beat  not 
the  bones  of  the  buried  :  when  he  breathed,  he  was 
a  man  ! " — words  which  may  remind  us  of  Shake- 
speare's own  epitaph.  In  the  last  scene,  an  ingenious 
turn  is  given  to  the  action,  so  that  the  piece  does  not 
conclude  after  the  manner  of  other  comedies. — 
"  Our  wooing  doth  not  end  like  an  old  play  ; 
Jack  hath  not  Jill :  " 

and  Shakespeare  strikes  a  passionate  note  across  it  at 
last,  in  the  entrance  of  the  messenger,  who  announces 
to  the  princess  that  the  king  her  father  is  suddenly 
dead. 

The  merely  dramatic  interest  of  the  piece  is  slight 

enough  ;     only  just    sufficient,  indeed,  to  form    the 

vehicle  of  its  wit  and  poetry.     The  scene — a  park  of 

the  King  of  Navarre — is  unaltered  throughout ;  and 

*  Act  V.  Scene  II. 


'LOVE'S  LABOURS  LOST'  169 

the  unity  of  the  play  is  not  so  much  the  unity  of  a 
drama  as  that  of  a  series  of  pictorial  groups,  in 
which  the  same  figures  reappear,  in  different  com- 
binations but  on  the  same  background.  It  is  as  if 
Shakespeare  had  intended  to  bind  together,  by  some 
inventive  conceit,  the  devices  of  an  ancient  tapestry, 
and  give  voices  to  its  figures.  On  one  side,  a  fair 
palace  ;  on  the  other,  the  tents  of  the  Princess  of 
France,  who  has  come  on  an  embassy  from  her 
father  to  the  King  of  Navarre  ;  in  the  midst,  a  wide 
space  of  smooth  grass.  The  same  personages  are 
combined  over  and  over  again  into  a  series  of  gallant 
scenes — the  princess,  the  three  masked  ladies,  the 
quaint,  pedantic  king  ;  one  of  those  amiable  kings 
men  have  never  loved  enough,  whose  serious  occupa- 
tion with  the  things  of  the  mind  seems,  by  contrast 
with  the  more  usual  forms  of  kingship,  like  frivolity 
or  play.  Some  of  the  figures  are  grotesque  merely, 
and  all  the  male  ones  at  least,  a  little  fantastic. 
Certain  objects  reappearing  from  scene  to  scene — 
love-letters  crammed  with  verses  to  the  margin,  and 
lovers'  toys — hint  obscurely  at  some  story  of  intrigue. 
Between  these  groups,  on  a  smaller  scale,  come  the 
slighter  and  more  homely  episodes,  with  Sir  Nathaniel 
the  curate,  the  country -maid  Jaquenetta,  Moth  or 
Mote  the  elfin-page,  with  Hiems  and  Ver,  who  recite 
"  the  dialogue  that  the  two  learned  men  have  com- 


170  APPRECIATIONS 

piled  in  praise  of  the  owl  and  the  cuckoo."  The 
ladies  are  lodged  in  tents,  because  the  king,  like  the 
princess  of  the  modern  poet's  fancy,  has  taken  a  vow 

"  To  make  his  court  a  little  Academe," 
and  for  three  years'  space  no  woman  may  come 
within  a  mile  of  it ;  and  the  play  shows  how  this 
artificial  attempt  was  broken  through.  For  the  king 
and  his  three  fellow- scholars  are  of  course  soon 
forsworn,  and  turn  to  writing  sonnets,  each  to  his 
chosen  lady.  These  fellow-scholars  of  the  king — 
"  quaint  votaries  of  science "  at  first,  afterwards 
"  affection's  men-at-arms  " — three  youthful  knights, 
gallant,  amorous,  chivalrous,  but  also  a  little  affected, 
sporting  always  a  curious  foppery  of  language,  are, 
throughout,  the  leading  figures  in  the  foreground  ; 
one  of  them,  in  particular,  being  more  carefully 
depicted  than  the  others,  and  in  himself  very 
noticeable  —  a  portrait  with  somewhat  puzzling 
manner  and  expression,  which  at  once  catches  the 
eye  irresistibly  and  keeps  it  fixed. 

Play  is  often  that  about  which  people  are  most 
serious  ;  and  the  humourist  may  observe  how,  under 
all  love  of  playthings,  there  is  almost  always  hidden 
an  appreciation  of  something  really  engaging  and 
delightful.  This  is  true  always  of  the  toys  of 
children  :  it  is  often  true  of  the  playthings  of  grown- 
up people,  their  vanities,  their  fopperies  even,  their 


'LOVE'S  LABOURS  LOST'  171 

lighter  loves  ;  the  cynic  would  add  their  pursuit  of 
fame.  Certainly,  this  is  true  without  exception  of 
the  playthings  of  a  past  age,  which  to  those  who 
succeed  it  are  always  full  of  a  pensive  interest — old 
manners,  old  dresses,  old  houses.  For  what  is  called 
fashion  in  these  matters  occupies,  in  each  age,  much 
of  the  care  of  many  of  the  most  discerning  people, 
furnishing  them  with  a  kind  of  mirror  of  their  real 
inward  refinements,  and  their  capacity  for  selection. 
Such  modes  or  fashions  are,  at  their  best,  an  example 
of  the  artistic  predominance  of  form  over  matter  ;  of 
the  manner  of  the  doing  of  it  over  the  thing  done  ; 
and  have  a  beauty  of  their  own.  It  is  so  with  that 
old  euphuism  of  the  Elizabethan  age — that  pride  of 
dainty  language  and  curious  expression,  which  it 
is  very  easy  to  ridicule,  which  often  made  itself 
ridiculous,  but  which  had  below  it  a  real  sense  of 
fitness  and  nicety  ;  and  which,  as  we  see  in  this  very 
play,  and  still  more  clearly  in  the  Sonnets,  had  some 
fascination  for  the  young  Shakespeare  himself.  It  is 
this  foppery  of  delicate  language,  this  fashionable 
plaything  of  his  time,  with  which  Shakespeare  is 
occupied  in  Love's  Labours  Lost.  He  shows  us  the 
manner  in  all  its  stages  ;  passing  from  the  grotesque 
and  vulgar  pedantry  of  Holofernes,  through  the 
extravagant  but  polished  caricature  of  Armado,  to 
become  the  peculiar  characteristic  of  a  real  though 


1 72  APPRECIA  TIONS 

still  quaint  poetry  in  Biron  himself,  who  is  still  charge- 
able even  at  his  best  with  just  a  little  affectation. 
As  Shakespeare  laughs  broadly  at  it  in  Holofernes 
or  Armado,  so  he  is  the  analyst  of  its  curious 
charm  in  Biron  ;  and  this  analysis  involves  a  deli- 
cate raillery  by  Shakespeare  himself  at  his  own  chosen 
manner. 

This  "  foppery  "  of  Shakespeare's  day  had,  then,  its 
really  delightful  side,  a  quality  in  no  sense  "  affected," 
by  which  it  satisfies  a  real  instinct  in  our  minds — 
the  fancy  so  many  of  us  have  for  an  exquisite  and 
curious  skill  in  the  use  of  words.  Biron  is  the 
perfect  flower  of  this  manner  : 

"  A  man  of  fire-new  words,  fashion's  own  knight :  " 

— as  he  describes  Armado,  in  terms  which  are  really 
applicable  to  himself.  In  him  this  manner  blends 
with  a  true  gallantry  of  nature,  and  an  affectionate 
complaisance  and  grace.  He  has  at  times  some  of 
its  extravagance  or  caricature  also,  but  the  shades  of 
expression  by  which  he  passes  from  this  to  the 
"  golden  cadence  "  of  Shakespeare's  own  most  charac- 
teristic verse,  are  so  fine,  that  it  is  sometimes  difficult 
to  trace  them.  What  is  a  vulgarity  in  Holofernes, 
and  a  caricature  in  Armado,  refines  itself  with  him 
into  the  expression  of  a  nature  truly  and  inwardly 
bent  upon  a  form  of  delicate  perfection,  and  is 
accompanied  by  a  real  insight  into  the  laws  which 


'LOVE'S  LABOURS  LOST'  173 

determine  what  is  exquisite  in  language,  and  their 
root  in  the  nature  of  things.  He  can  appreciate 
quite  the  opposite  style — 

"  In  russet  yeas,  and  honest  kersey  noes  ; " 

he  knows  the  first  law  of  pathos,  that 

"  Honest  plain  words  best  suit  the  ear  of  grief." 

He  delights  in  his  own  rapidity  of  intuition  ;  and,  in 
harmony  with  the  half-sensuous  philosophy  of  the 
Sonnets,  exalts,  a  little  scornfully,  in  many  memorable 
expressions,  the  judgment  of  the  senses,  above  all 
slower,  more  toilsome  means  of  knowledge,  scorning 
some  who  fail  to  see  things  only  because  they  are  so 
clear : 

"  So  ere  you  find  where  light  in  darkness  lies, 
Your  light  grows  dark  by  losing  of  your  eyes  :  " — 

as  with  some  German  commentators  on  Shakespeare. 
Appealing  always  to  actual  sensation  from  men's 
affected  theories,  he  might  seem  to  despise  learning ; 
as,  indeed,  he  has  taken  up  his  deep  studies  partly 
in  sport,  and  demands  always  the  profit  of  learning 
in  renewed  enjoyment.  Yet  he  surprises  us  from  time 
to  time  by  intuitions  which  could  come  only  from 
a  deep  experience  and  power  of  observation  ;  and 
men  listen  to  him,  old  and  young,  in  spite  of  them- 
selves. He  is  quickly  impressible  to  the  slightest 
clouding  of  the  spirits  in  social  intercourse,  and  has 


1 74  APPRECIA  TIONS 

his  moments  of  extreme  seriousness  :  his  trial-task 
may  well  be,  as  Rosaline  puts  it — 

"  To  enforce  the  pained  impotent  to  smile." 
But  still,  through  all,  he  is  true  to  his  chosen  manner  : 
that  gloss  of  dainty  language  is  a  second  nature  with 
him  :  even  at  his  best  he  is  not  without  a  certain 
artifice :  the  trick  of  playing  on  words  never  deserts 
him  ;  and  Shakespeare,  in  whose  own  genius  there  is 
an  element  of  this  very  quality,  shows  us  in  this 
graceful,  and,  as  it  seems,  studied,  portrait,  his  enjoy- 
ment of  it. 

As  happens  with  every  true  dramatist,  Shakespeare 
is  for  the  most  part  hidden  behind  the  persons  of  his 
creation.  Yet  there  are  certain  of  his  characters  in 
which  we  feel  that  there  is  something  of  self-por- 
traiture. And  it  is  not  so  much  in  his  grander,  more 
subtle  and  ingenious  creations  that  we  feel  this — in 
Hamlet  and  King  Lear — as  in  those  slighter  and 
more  spontaneously  developed  figures,  who,  while  far 
from  playing  principal  parts,  are  yet  distinguished 
by  a  peculiar  happiness  and  delicate  ease  in  the 
drawing  of  them  ;  figures  which  possess,  above  all, 
that  winning  attractiveness  which  there  is  no  man 
but  would  willingly  exercise,  and  which  resemble 
those  works  of  art  which,  though  not  meant  to  be 
very  great  or  imposing,  are  yet  wrought  of  the 
choicest   material.       Mercutio,  in  Romeo  and  Juliet, 


'LOVE'S  LABOURS  LOST'  175 

belongs  to  this  group  of  Shakespeare's  characters — 
versatile,  mercurial  people,  such  as  make  good  actors, 
and  in  whom  the 

"  Nimble  spirits  of  the  arteries," 

the  finer  but  still  merely  animal  elements  of  great 
wit,  predominate.  A  careful  delineation  of  minor, 
yet  expressive  traits  seems  to  mark  them  out  as 
the  characters  of  his  predilection  ;  and  it  is  hard  not 
to  identify  him  with  these  more  than  with  others. 
Biron,  in  Love's  Labours  Lost,  is  perhaps  the  most 
striking  member  of  this  group.  In  this  character, 
which  is  never  quite  in  touch,  never  quite  on  a 
perfect  level  of  understanding,  with  the  other  persons 
of  the  play,  we  see,  perhaps,  a  reflex  of  Shakespeare 
himself,  when  he  has  just  become  able  to  stand  aside 
from  and  estimate  the  first  period  of  his  poetry. 

1878. 


' MEASURE  FOR  MEASURE' 

In  Measure  for  Measure,  as  in  some  other  of  his 
plays,  Shakespeare  has  remodelled  an  earlier  and 
somewhat  rough  composition  to  "  finer  issues,"  suffer- 
ing much  to  remain  as  it  had  come  from  the  less 
skilful  hand,  and  not  raising  the  whole  of  his  work  to 
an  equal  degree  of  intensity.  Hence  perhaps  some 
of  that  depth  and  weightiness  which  make  this  play 
so  impressive,  as  with  the  true  seal  of  experience,  like 
a  fragment  of  life  itself,  rough  and  disjointed  indeed, 
but  forced  to  yield  in  places  its  profounder  meaning. 
In  Measure  for  Measure,  in  contrast  with  the  flawless 
execution  of  Romeo  and  Juliet,  Shakespeare  has  spent 
his  art  in  just  enough  modification  of  the  scheme  of 
the  older  play  to  make  it  exponent  of  this  purpose, 
adapting  its  terrible  essential  incidents,  so  that  Cole- 
ridge found  it  the  only  painful  work  among  Shake- 
speare's dramas,  and  leaving  for  the  reader  of  to-day 
more  than  the  usual  number  of  difficult  expressions  ; 
but  infusing  a  lavish  colour  and  a  profound  signifi- 


'MEASURE  FOR  MEASURE'  177 

cance  into  it,  so  that  under  his  touch  certain  select 
portions  of  it  rise  far  above  the  level  of  all  but  his 
own  best  poetry,  and  working  out  of  it  a  morality 
so  characteristic  that  the  play  might  well  pass  for 
the  central  expression  of  his  moral  judgments.  It 
remains  a  comedy,  as  indeed  is  congruous  with  the 
bland,  half-humorous  equity  which  informs  the  whole 
composition,  sinking  from  the  heights  of  sorrow  and 
terror  into  the  rough  scheme  of  the  earlier  piece  ; 
yet  it  is  hardly  less  full  of  what  is  really  tragic  in 
man's  existence  than  if  Claudio  had  indeed  "  stooped 
to  death."  Even  the  humorous  concluding  scenes 
have  traits  of  special  grace,  retaining  in  less  emphatic 
passages  a  stray  line  or  word  of  power,  as  it  seems, 
so  that  we  watch  to  the  end  for  the  traces  where  the 
nobler  hand  has  glanced  along,  leaving  its  vestiges, 
as  if  accidentally  or  wastefully,  in  the  rising  of  the 
style. 

The  interest  of  Measure  for  Measure,  therefore,  is 
partly  that  of  an  old  story  told  over  again.  We 
measure  with  curiosity  that  variety  of  resources 
which  has  enabled  Shakespeare  to  refashion  the 
original  material  with  a  higher  motive  ;  adding  to 
the  intricacy  of  the  piece,  yet  so  modifying  its 
structure  as  to  give  the  whole  almost  the  unity  of 
a  single  scene ;  lending,  by  the  light  of  a  philosophy 
which  dwells  much  on  what  is  complex  and  subtle 


178  APPRECIA  TIONS 

in  our  nature,  a  true  human  propriety  to  its  strange 
and  unexpected  turns  of  feeling  and  character,  to 
incidents  so  difficult  as  the  fall  of  Angelo,  and  the 
subsequent  reconciliation  of  Isabella,  so  that  she 
pleads  successfully  for  his  life.  It  was  from  Whet- 
stone, a  contemporary  English  writer,  that  Shakespeare 
derived  the  outline  of  Cinthio's  u  rare  history "  of 
Promos  and  Cassandra,  one  of  that  numerous  class 
of  Italian  stories,  like  Boccaccio's  Tancred  of  Salerno, 
in  which  the  mere  energy  of  southern  passion  has 
everything  its  own  way,  and  which,  though  they  may 
repel  many  a  northern  reader  by  a  certain  crudity  in 
their  colouring,  seem  to  have  been  full  of  fascination 
for  the  Elizabethan  age.  This  story,  as  it  appears 
in  Whetstone's  endless  comedy,  is  almost  as  rough 
as  the  roughest  episode  of  actual  criminal  life.  But 
the  play  seems  never  to  have  been  acted,  and  some 
time  after  its  publication  Whetstone  himself  turned 
the  thing  into  a  tale,  included  in  his  Heptameroti  of 
Civil  Discourses,  where  it  still  figures  as  a  genuine 
piece,  with  touches  of  undesigned  poetry,  a  quaint 
field-flower  here  and  there  of  diction  or  sentiment, 
the  whole  strung  up  to  an  effective  brevity,  and  with 
the  fragrance  of  that  admirable  age  of  literature  all 
about  it.  Here,  then,  there  is  something  of  the 
original  Italian  colour  :  in  this  narrative  Shakespeare 
may  well  have  caught  the  first  glimpse  of  a  com- 


'MEASURE  FOR  MEASURE'  179 

position  with  nobler  proportions  ;  and  some  artless 
sketch  from  his  own  hand,  perhaps,  putting  together 
his  first  impressions,  insinuated  itself  between 
Whetstone's  work  and  the  play  as  we  actually  read 
it.  Out  of  these  insignificant  sources  Shakespeare's 
play  rises,  full  of  solemn  expression,  and  with  a 
profoundly  designed  beauty,  the  new  body  of  a 
higher,  though  sometimes  remote  and  difficult  poetry, 
escaping  from  the  imperfect  relics  of  the  old  story, 
yet  not  wholly  transformed,  and  even  as  it  stands 
but  the  preparation  only,  we  might  think,  of  a  still 
more  imposing  design.  For  once  we  have  in  it  a  real 
example  of  that  sort  of  writing  which  is  sometimes 
described  as  suggestive,  and  which  by  the  help  of  cer- 
tain subtly  calculated  hints  only,  brings  into  distinct 
shape  the  reader's  own  half- developed  imaginings. 
Often  the  quality  is  attributed  to  writing  merely 
vague  and  unrealised,  but  in  Measure  for  Measure, 
quite  certainly,  Shakespeare  has  directed  the  attention 
of  sympathetic  readers  along  certain  channels  of 
meditation  beyond  the  immediate  scope  of  his  work. 
Measure  for  Measure,  therefore,  by  the  quality 
of  these  higher  designs,  woven  by  his  strange  magic 
on  a  texture  of  poorer  quality,  is  hardly  less  indicative 
than  Hamlet  even,  of  Shakespeare's  reason,  of  his 
power  of  moral  interpretation.  It  deals,  not  like 
Hamlet  with  the  problems  which  beset  one  of  ex- 


1 80  AP PR  EC  I  A  TIONS 

ceptional  temperament,  but  with  mere  human  nature. 
It  brings  before  us  a  group  of  persons,  attractive,  full 
of  desire,  vessels  of  the  genial,  seed-bearing  powers 
of  nature,  a  gaudy  existence  flowering  out  over  the  old 
court  and  city  of  Vienna,  a  spectacle  of  the  fulness 
and  pride  of  life  which  to  some  may  seem  to  touch 
the  verge  of  wantonness.  Behind  this  group  of 
people,  behind  their  various  action,  Shakespeare 
inspires  in  us  the  sense  of  a  strong  tyranny  of  nature 
and  circumstance.  Then  what  shall  there  be  on  this 
side  of  it — on  our  side,  the  spectators'  side,  of  this 
painted  screen,  with  its  puppets  who  are  really  glad 
or  sorry  all  the  time  ?  what  philosophy  of  life,  what 
sort  of  equity  ? 

Stimulated  to  read  more  carefully  by  Shakespeare's 
own  profounder  touches,  the  reader  will  note  the 
vivid  reality,  the  subtle  interchange  of  light  and 
shade,  the  strongly  contrasted  characters  of  this 
group  of  persons,  passing  across  the  stage  so 
quickly.  The  slightest  of  them  is  at  least  not 
ill-natured  :  the  meanest  of  them  can  put  forth  a 
plea  for  existence —  Truly,  sir,  I  am  a  poor  fellow 
that  would  live  I — they  are  never  sure  of  themselves, 
even  in  the  strong  tower  of  a  cold  unimpressible 
nature :  they  are  capable  of  many  friendships  and 
of  a  true  dignity  in  danger,  giving  each  other  a 
sympathetic,   if   transitory,    regret — one   sorry   that 


'MEASURE  FOR  MEASURE'  181 

another  "  should  be  foolishly  lost  at  a  game  of 
tick-tack."  Words  which  seem  to  exhaust  man's 
deepest  sentiment  concerning  death  and  life  are 
put  on  the  lips  of  a  gilded,  witless  youth  ;  and  the 
saintly  Isabella  feels  fire  creep  along  her,  kindling 
her  tongue  to  eloquence  at  the  suggestion  of  shame. 
In  places  the  shadow  deepens  :  death  intrudes  itself 
on  the  scene,  as  among  other  things  "  a  great 
disguiser,"  blanching  the  features  of  youth  and 
spoiling  its  goodly  hair,  touching  the  fine  Claudio 
even  with  its  disgraceful  associations.  As  in 
Orcagna's  fresco  at  Pisa,  it  comes  capriciously, 
giving  many  and  long  reprieves  to  Barnardine,  who 
has  been  waiting  for  it  nine  years  in  prison,  taking 
another  thence  by  fever,  another  by  mistake  of 
judgment,  embracing  others  in  the  midst  of  their 
music  and  song.  The  little  mirror  of  existence, 
which  reflects  to  each  for  a  moment  the  stage  on 
which  he  plays,  is  broken  at  last  by  a  capricious 
accident ;  while  all  alike,  in  their  yearning  for 
untasted  enjoyment,  are  really  discounting  their 
days,  grasping  so  hastily  and  accepting  so  inexactly 
the  precious  pieces.  The  Duke's  quaint  but  ex- 
cellent moralising  at  the  beginning  of  the  third  act 
does  but  express,  like  the  chorus  of  a  Greek  play, 
the  spirit  of  the  passing  incidents.  To  him  in  Shake- 
speare's play,  to  a  few  here  and  there  in  the  actual 

N 


1 82  APPRECIA  TIONS 

world,  this  strange  practical  paradox  of  our  life,  so  un- 
wise in  its  eager  haste,  reveals  itself  in  all  its  clearness. 
The  Duke  disguised  as  a  friar,  with  his  curious 
moralising  on  life  and  death,  and  Isabella  in  her  first 
mood  of  renunciation,  a  thing  "  ensky'd  and  sainted," 
come  with  the  quiet  of  the  cloister  as  a  relief  to 
this  lust  and  pride  of  life :  like  some  grey  monastic 
picture  hung  on  the  wall  of  a  gaudy  room,  their 
presence  cools  the  heated  air  of  the  piece.  For  a 
moment  we  are  within  the  placid  conventual  walls, 
whither  they  fancy  at  first  that  the  Duke  has  come 
as  a  man  crossed  in  love,  with  Friar  Thomas  and 
Friar  Peter,  calling  each  other  by  their  homely, 
English  names,  or  at  the  nunnery  among  the  novices, 
with  their  little  limited  privileges,  where 

"  If  you  speak  you  must  not  show  your  face, 
Or  if  you  show  your  face  you  must  not  speak." 

Not  less  precious  for  this  relief  in  the  general 
structure  of  the  piece,  than  for  its  own  peculiar 
graces  is  the  episode  of  Mariana,  a  creature  wholly 
of  Shakespeare's  invention,  told,  by  way  of  interlude, 
in  subdued  prose.  The  moated  grange,  with  its 
dejected  mistress,  its  long,  listless,  discontented  days, 
where  we  hear  only  the  voice  of  a  boy  broken  off 
suddenly  in  the  midst  of  one  of  the  loveliest  songs 
of  Shakespeare,  or  of  Shakespeare's  school,*  is  the 

*  Fletcher,  in  the  Bloody  Brother,  gives  the  rest  of  it. 


'MEASURE  FOR  MEASURE'  183 

pleasantest  of  many  glimpses  we  get  here  of  pleasant 
places — the  fields  without  the  town,  Angelo's  garden- 
house,  the  consecrated  fountain.  Indirectly  it  has 
suggested  two  of  the  most  perfect  compositions 
among  the  poetry  of  our  own  generation.  Again  it 
is  a  picture  within  a  picture,  but  with  fainter  lines 
and  a  greyer  atmosphere :  we  have  here  the  same 
passions,  the  same  wrongs,  the  same  continuance  of 
affection,  the  same  crying  out  upon  death,  as  in 
the  nearer  and  larger  piece,  though  softened,  and 
reduced  to  the  mood  of  a  more  dreamy  scene. 

Of  Angelo  we  may  feel  at  first  sight  inclined  to 
say  only  guarda  e  passa  !  or  to  ask  whether  he  is 
indeed  psychologically  possible.  In  the  old  story, 
he  figures  as  an  embodiment  of  pure  and  unmodified 
evil,  like  "  Hyliogabalus  of  Rome  or  Denis  of  Sicyll." 
But  the  embodiment  of  pure  evil  is  no  proper  subject 
of  art,  and  Shakespeare,  in  the  spirit  of  a  philosophy 
which  dwells  much  on  the  complications  of  outward 
circumstance  with  men's  inclinations,  turns  into  a 
subtle  study  in  casuistry  this  incident  of  the  austere 
judge  fallen  suddenly  into  utmost  corruption  by  a 
momentary  contact  with  supreme  purity.  But  the 
main  interest  in  Measure  for  Measure  is  not,  as  in 
Promos  and  Cassandra,  in  the  relation  of  Isabella  and 
Angelo,  but  rather  in  the  relation  of  Claudio  and 
Isabella. 


1 84  APPRECIA  TIONS 

Greek  tragedy  in  some  of  its  noblest  products 
has  taken  for  its  theme  the  love  of  a  sister,  a  senti- 
ment unimpassioned  indeed,  purifying  by  the  very 
spectacle  of  its  passionlessness,  but  capable  of  a  fierce 
and  almost  animal  strength  if  informed  for  a  moment 
by  pity  and  regret.  At  first  Isabella  comes  upon 
the  scene  as  a  tranquillising  influence  in  it.  But 
Shakespeare,  in  the  development  of  the  action,  brings 
quite  different  and  unexpected  qualities  out  of  her. 
It  is  his  characteristic  poetry  to  expose  this  cold, 
chastened  personality,  respected  even  by  the  worldly 
Lucio  as  "  something  ensky'd  and  sainted,  and  almost 
an  immortal  spirit,"  to  two  sharp,  shameful  trials, 
and  wring  out  of  her  a  fiery,  revealing  eloquence. 
Thrown  into  the  terrible  dilemma  of  the  piece,  called 
upon  to  sacrifice  that  cloistral  whiteness  to  sisterly 
affection,  become  in  a  moment  the  ground  of  strong} 
contending  passions,  she  develops  a  new  character 
and  shows  herself  suddenly  of  kindred  with  those 
strangely  conceived  women,  like  Webster's  Vittoria, 
who  unite  to  a  seductive  sweetness  something  of  a 
dangerous  and  tigerlike  changefulness  of  feeling. 
The  swift,  vindictive  anger  leaps,  like  a  white  flame, 
into  this  white  spirit,  and,  stripped  in  a  moment  of 
all  convention,  she  stands  before  us  clear,  detached, 
columnar,  among  the  tender  frailties  of  the  piece. 
Cassandra,  the   original   of  Isabella  in  Whetstone's 


'MEASURE  FOR  MEASURE'  185 

tale,  with  the  purpose  of  the  Roman  Lucretia  in 
her  mind,  yields  gracefully  enough  to  the  conditions 
of  her  brother's  safety  ;  and  to  the  lighter  reader  of 
Shakespeare  there  may  seem  something  harshly  con- 
ceived, or  psychologically  impossible  even,  in  the 
suddenness  of  the  change  wrought  in  her,  as  Claudio 
welcomes  for  a  moment  the  chance  of  life  through 
her  compliance  with  Angelo's  will,  and  he  may  have 
a  sense  here  of  flagging  skill,  as  in  words  less  finely 
handled  than  in  the  preceding  scene.  The  play, 
though  still  not  without  traces  of  nobler  handiwork, 
sinks  down,  as  we  know,  at  last  into  almost  homely 
comedy,  and  it  might  be  supposed  that  just  here 
the  grander  manner  deserted  it.  But  the  skill  with 
which  Isabella  plays  upon  Claudio's  well-recognised 
sense  of  honour,  and  endeavours  by  means  of  that  to 
insure  him  beforehand  from  the  acceptance  of  life 
on  baser  terms,  indicates  no  coming  laxity  of  hand 
just  in  this  place.  It  was  rather  that  there  rose  in 
Shakespeare's  conception,  as  there  may  for  the  reader, 
as  there  certainly  would  in  any  good  acting  of  the 
part,  something  of  that  terror,  the  seeking  for  which 
is  one  of  the  notes  of  romanticism  in  Shakespeare 
and  his  circle.  The  stream  of  ardent  natural  affec- 
tion, poured  as  sudden  hatred  upon  the  youth  con- 
demned to  die,  adds  an  additional  note  of  expression 
to  the  horror  of  the  prison  where  so  much  of  the 


1 86  *  APPRECIATIONS 

scene  takes  place.  It  is  not  here  only  that  Shake- 
speare has  conceived  of  such  extreme  anger  and  pity- 
as  putting  a  sort  of  genius  into  simple  women,  so 
that  their  "  lips  drop  eloquence,"  and  their  intuitions 
interpret  that  which  is  often  too  hard  or  fine  for 
manlier  reason  ;  and  it  is  Isabella  with  her  grand 
imaginative  diction,  and  that  poetry  laid  upon  the 
"  prone  and  speechless  dialect  "  there  is  in  mere  youth 
itself,  who  gives  utterance  to  the  equity,  the  finer 
judgments  of  the  piece  on  men  and  things. 

From  behind  this  group  with  its  subtle  lights  and 
shades,  its  poetry,  its  impressive  contrasts,  Shake- 
speare, as  I  said,  conveys  to  us  a  strong  sense  of  the 
tyranny  of  nature  and  circumstance  over  human 
action.  The  most  powerful  expressions  of  this  side 
of  experience  might  be  found  here.  The  bloodless, 
impassible  temperament  does  but  wait  for  its  oppor- 
tunity, for  the  almost  accidental  coherence  of  time 
with  place,  and  place  with  wishing,  to  annul  its  long 
and  patient  discipline,  and  become  in  a  moment  the 
very  opposite  of  that  which  under  ordinary  conditions 
it  seemed  to  be,  even  to  itself.  The  mere  resolute 
self-assertion  of  the  blood  brings  to  others  special 
temptations,  temptations  which,  as  defects  or  over- 
growths, lie  in  the  very  qualities  which  make  them 
otherwise  imposing  or  attractive  ;  the  very  advantage 
of  men's  gifts  of  intellect  or  sentiment  being  depen- 


'MEASURE  FOR  MEASURE'  187 

dent  on  a  balance  in  their  use  so  delicate  that  men 
hardly  maintain  it  always.  Something  also  must  be 
conceded  to  influences  merely  physical,  to  the  com- 
plexion of  the  heavens,  the  skyey  influences,  shifting 
as  the  stars  shift ;  as  something  also  to  the  mere 
caprice  of  men  exercised  over  each  other  in  the  dis- 
pensations of  social  or  political  order,  to  the  chance 
which  makes  the  life  or  death  of  Claudio  dependent 
on  Angelo's  will. 

The  many  veins  of  thought  which  render  the  poetry 
of  this  play  so  weighty  and  impressive  unite  in  the 
image  of  Claudio,  a  flowerlike  young  man,  whom, 
prompted  by  a  few  hints  from  Shakespeare,  the 
imagination  easily  clothes  with  all  the  bravery  of 
youth,  as  he  crosses  the  stage  before  us  on  his  way 
to  death,  coming  so  hastily  to  the  end  of  his  pilgrim- 
age. Set  in  the  horrible  blackness  of  the  prison, 
with  its  various  forms  of  unsightly  death,  this  flower 
seems  the  braver.  Fallen  by  "  prompture  of  the 
blood,"  the  victim  of  a  suddenly  revived  law  against 
the  common  fault  of  youth  like  his,  he  finds  his 
life  forfeited  as  if  by  the  chance  of  a  lottery.  With 
that  instinctive  clinging  to  life,  which  breaks  through 
the  subtlest  casuistries  of  monk  or  sage  apologising 
for  an  early  death,  he  welcomes  for  a  moment  the 
chance  of  life  through  his  sister's  shame,  though  he 
revolts  hardly  less  from  the  notion  of  perpetual  im- 


1 88  A  PP  RECTA  TIONS 

prisonment  so  repulsive  to  the  buoyant  energy  of 
youth.  Familiarised,  by  the  words  alike  of  friends 
and  the  indifferent,  to  the  thought  of  death,  he  becomes 
gentle  and  subdued  indeed,  yet  more  perhaps  through 
pride  than  real  resignation,  and  would  go  down  to 
darkness  at  last  hard  and  unblinded.  Called  upon 
suddenly  to  encounter  his  fate,  looking  with  keen 
and  resolute  profile  straight  before  him,  he  gives 
utterance  to  some  of  the  central  truths  of  human 
feeling,  the  sincere,  concentrated  expression  of  the 
recoiling  flesh.  Thoughts  as  profound  and  poetical 
as  Hamlet's  arise  in  him  ;  and  but  for  the  accidental 
arrest  of  sentence  he  would  descend  into  the  dust, 
a  mere  gilded,  idle  flower  of  youth  indeed,  but  with 
what  are  perhaps  the  most  eloquent  of  all  Shake- 
speare's words  upon  his  lips. 

As  Shakespeare  in  Measure  for  Measure  has  re- 
fashioned, after  a  nobler  pattern,  materials  already 
at  hand,  so  that  the  relics  of  other  men's  poetry  are 
incorporated  into  his  perfect  work,  so  traces  of  the 
old  "  morality,"  that  early  form  of  dramatic  compo- 
sition which  had  for  its  function  the  inculcating  of 
some  moral  theme,  survive  in  it  also,  and  give  it  a 
peculiar  ethical  interest.  This  ethical  interest,  though 
it  can  escape  no  attentive  reader,  yet,  in  accordance 
with  that  artistic  law  which  demands  the  predomi- 
nance of  form  everywhere  over  the  mere  matter  or 


'MEASURE  FOR  MEASURE'  189 

subject  handled,  is  not  to  be  wholly  separated  from 
the  special  circumstances,  necessities,  embarrassments, 
of  these  particular  dramatic  persons.  The  old 
"  moralities  "  exemplified  most  often  some  rough-and- 
ready  lesson.  Here  the  very  intricacy  and  subtlety 
of  the  moral  world  itself,  the  difficulty  of  seizing  the 
true  relations  of  so  complex  a  material,  the  difficulty 
of  just  judgment,  of  judgment  that  shall  not  be 
unjust,  are  the  lessons  conveyed.  Even  in  Whet- 
stone's old  story  this  peculiar  vein  of  moralising 
comes  to  the  surface :  even  there,  we  notice  the 
tendency  to  dwell  on  mixed  motives,  the  contending 
issues  of  action,  the  presence  of  virtues  and  vices 
alike  in  unexpected  places,  on  "  the  hard  choice  of 
two  evils,"  on  the  "  imprisoning "  of  men's  "  real 
intents."  Measure  for  Measure  is  full  of  expressions 
drawn  from  a  profound  experience  of  these  casuist- 
ries, and  that  ethical  interest  becomes  predominant 
in  it  :  it  is  no  longer  Promos  and  Cassandra,  but 
Measure  for  Measure,  its  new  name  expressly  sug- 
gesting the  subject  of  poetical  justice.  The  action  of 
the  play,  like  the  action  of  life  itself  for  the  keener 
observer,  develops  in  us  the  conception  of  this 
poetical  justice,  and  the  yearning  to  realise  it,  the  true 
justice  of  which  Angelo  knows  nothing,  because  it 
lies  for  the  most  part  beyond  the  limits  of  any 
acknowledged  law.     The  idea  of  justice  involves  the 


1 90  APPRECIA  TIONS 

idea  of  rights.  But  at  bottom  rights  are  equivalent  to 
that  which  really  is,  to  facts  ;  and  the  recognition  of  his 
rights  therefore,  the  justice  he  requires  of  our  hands, 
or  our  thoughts,  is  the  recognition  of  that  which 
the  person,  in  his  inmost  nature,  really  is  ;  and 
as  sympathy  alone  can  discover  that  which  really  is 
in  matters  of  feeling  and  thought,  true  justice  is  in 
its  essence  a  finer  knowledge  through  love. 

"  'Tis  very  pregnant : 
The  jewel  that  we  find  we  stoop  and  take  it, 
Because  we  see  it ;  but  what  we  do  not  see 
We  tread  upon,  and  never  think  of  it." 

It  is  for  this  finer  justice,  a  justice  based  on  a  more 
delicate  appreciation  of  the  true  conditions  of  men 
and  things,  a  true  respect  of  persons  in  our  estimate 
of  actions,  that  the  people  in  Measure  for  Measure 
cry  out  as  they  pass  before  us  ;  and  as  the  poetry 
of  this  play  is  full  of  the  peculiarities  of  Shakespeare's 
poetry,  so  in  its  ethics  it  is  an  epitome  of  Shakespeare's 
moral  judgments.  They  are  the  moral  judgments 
of  an  observer,  of  one  who  sits  as  a  spectator,  and 
knows  how  the  threads  in  the  design  before  him 
hold  together  under  the  surface  :  they  are  the  judg- 
ments of  the  humourist  also,  who  follows  with  a 
half-amused  but  always  pitiful  sympathy,  the  various 
ways  of  human  disposition,  and  sees  less  distance 
than  ordinary  men  between  what  are  called  respect- 


'MEASURE  FOR  MEASURE'  191 

ively  great  and  little  things.  It  is  not  always  that 
poetry  can  be  the  exponent  of  morality  ;  but  it  is 
this  aspect  of  morals  which  it  represents  most 
naturally,  for  this  true  justice  is  dependent  on  just 
those  finer  appreciations  which  poetry  cultivates  in 
us  the  power  of  making,  those  peculiar  valuations  of 
action  and  its  effect  which  poetry  actually  requires. 

1874- 


SHAKESPEARE'S  ENGLISH  KINGS 

"  A  brittle  glory  shineth  in  this  face  : 
As  brittle  as  the  glory  is  the  face." 

The  English  plays  of  Shakespeare  needed  but  the 
completion  of  one  unimportant  interval  to  possess 
the  unity  of  a  popular  chronicle  from  Richard  the 
Second  to  Henry  the  Eighth,  and  possess,  as  they 
actually  stand,  the  unity  of  a  common  motive  in  the 
handling  of  the  various  events  and  persons  which 
they  bring  before  us.  Certain  of  his  historic  dramas, 
not  English,  display  Shakespeare's  mastery  in  the 
development  of  the  heroic  nature  amid  heroic  circum- 
stances ;  and  had  he  chosen,  from  English  history, 
to  deal  with  Cceur-de-Lion  or  Edward  the  First,  the 
innate  quality  of  his  subject  would  doubtless  have 
called  into  play  something  of  that  profound  and 
sombre  power  which  in  Julius  Ccesar  and  Mac- 
beth has  sounded  the  depths  of  mighty  character. 
True,  on  the  whole,  to  fact,  it  is  another  side  of 
kingship  which  he  has  made  prominent  in  his  English 


SHAKESPEARE'S  ENGLISH  KINGS  193 

histories.  The  irony  of  kingship — average  human 
nature,  flung  with  a  wonderfully  pathetic  effect  into 
the  vortex  of  great  events  ;  tragedy  of  everyday 
quality  heightened  in  degree  only  by  the  conspicuous 
scene  which  does  but  make  those  who  play  their 
parts  there  conspicuously  unfortunate  ;  the  utterance 
of  common  humanity  straight  from  the  heart,  but 
refined  like  other  common  things  for  kingly  uses 
by  Shakespeare's  unfailing  eloquence :  such,  uncon- 
sciously for  the  most  part,  though  palpably  enough  to 
the  careful  reader,  is  the  conception  under  which 
Shakespeare  has  arranged  the  lights  and  shadows  of 
the  story  of  the  English  kings,  emphasising  merely 
the  light  and  shadow  inherent  in  it,  and  keeping  very 
close  to  the  original  authorities,  not  simply  in  the 
general  outline  of  these  dramatic  histories  but  some- 
times in  their  very  expression.  Certainly  the  history 
itself,  as  he  found  it  in  Hall,  Holinshed,  and  Stowe, 
those  somewhat  picturesque  old  chroniclers  who  had 
themselves  an  eye  for  the  dramatic  "  effects  of 
human  life,  has  much  of  this  sentiment  already  about 
it.  What  he  did  not  find  there  was  the  natural 
prerogative — such  justification,  in  kingly,  that  is  to 
say,  in  exceptional,  qualities,  of  the  exceptional  posi- 
tion, as  makes  it  practicable  in  the  result.  It  is  no 
Henriade  he  writes,  and  no  history  of  the  English 
people,  but  the  sad  fortunes  of  some  English  kings 


194  APPRECIATIONS 

as  conspicuous  examples  of  the  ordinary  human 
condition.  As  in  a  children's  story,  all  princes  are 
in  extremes.  Delightful  in  the  sunshine  above  the 
wall  into  which  chance  lifts  the  flower  for  a  season, 
they  can  but  plead  somewhat  more  touchingly  than 
others  their  everyday  weakness  in  the  storm.  Such 
is  the  motive  that  gives  unity  to  these  unequal  and 
intermittent  contributions  toward  a  slowly  evolved 
dramatic  chronicle,  which  it  would  have  taken  many 
days  to  rehearse  ;  a  not  distant  story  from  real  life 
still  well  remembered  in  its  general  course,  to  which 
people  might  listen  now  and  again,  as  long  as  they 
cared,  finding  human  nature  at  least  wherever  their 
attention  struck  ground  in  it. 

He  begins  with  Jolyi,  and  allows  indeed  to  the 
first  of  these  English  kings  a  kind  of  greatness,  making 
the  development  of  the  play  centre  in  the  counter- 
action of  his  natural  gifts — that  something  of  heroic 
force  about  him — by  a  madness  which  takes  the 
shape  of  reckless  impiety,  forced  especially  on  men's 
attention  by  the  terrible  circumstances  of  his  end,  in 
the  delineation  of  which  Shakespeare  triumphs,  set- 
ting, with  true  poetic  tact;  this  incident  of  the  king's 
death,  in  all  the  horror  of  a  violent  one,  amid  a  scene 
delicately  suggestive  of  what  is  perennially  peaceful 
and  genial  in  the  outward  world.  Like  the  sensual 
humours  of  Falstaff  in  another  play,  the  presence  of 


SHAKESPEARE'S  ENGLISH  KINGS  195 

the  bastard  Faulconbridge,  with  his  physical  energy 
and  his  unmistakable  family  likeness — "  those  limbs 
which  Sir  Robert  never  holp  to  make"  * — contributes 
to  an  almost  coarse  assertion  of  the  force  of  nature, 
of  the  somewhat  ironic  preponderance  of  nature  and 
circumstance  over  men's  artificial  arrangements,  to  the 
recognition  of  a  certain  potent  natural  aristocracy, 
which  is  far  from  being  always  identical  with  that 
more  formal,  heraldic  one.  And  what  is  a  coarse 
fact  in  the  case  of  Faulconbridge  becomes  a  motive 
of  pathetic  appeal  in  the  wan  and  babyish  Arthur. 
The  magic  with  which  nature  models  tiny  and  deli- 
cate children  to  the  likeness  of  their  rough  fathers  is 
nowhere  more  justly  expressed  than  in  the  words  of 
King  Philip. — 

"  Look  here  upon  thy  brother  Geoffrey's  face  ! 
These  eyes,  these  brows  were  moulded  out  of  his  : 
This  little  abstract  doth  contain  that  large 
Which  died  in  Geoffrey  ;  and  the  hand  of  time 
Shall  draw  this  brief  into  as  huge  a  volume." 

It  was  perhaps  something  of  a  boyish  memory  of 
the  shocking  end  of  his  father  that  had  distorted  the 
piety  of  Henry  the  Third  into  superstitious  terror. 
A  frightened  soul,  himself  touched  with  the  contrary 
sort  of  religious  madness,  doting  on  all  that  was  alien 
from  his  father's  huge  ferocity,  on  the  genialities,  the 

*  Elinor,   Do  you  not  read  some  tokens  of  my  son  (Coeur-de-Lion) 
In  the  large  composition  of  this  man  ? 


196  APPRECIATIONS 

soft  gilding,  of  life,  on  the  genuine  interests  of  art  and 
poetry,  to  be  credited  more  than  any  other  person 
with  the  deep  religious  expression  of  Westminster 
Abbey,  Henry  the  Third,  picturesque  though  useless, 
but  certainly  touching,  might  have  furnished  Shake- 
speare, had  he  filled  up  this  interval  in  his  series,  with 
precisely  the  kind  of  effect  he  tends  towards  in  his 
English  plays.  But  he  found  it  completer  still  in 
the  person  and  story  of  Richard  the  Second,  a  figure 
— "  that  sweet  lovely  rose  " — which  haunts  Shake- 
speare's mind,  as  it  seems  long  to  have  haunted  the 
minds  of  the  English  people,  as  the  most  touching  of 
all  examples  of  the  irony  of  kingship. 

Henry  the  Fourth — to  look  for  a  moment  beyond 
our  immediate  subject,  in  pursuit  of  Shakespeare's 
thought — is  presented,  of  course,  in  general  outline, 
as  an  impersonation  of  "  surviving  force  : "  he  has  a 
certain  amount  of  kingcraft  also,  a  real  fitness  for 
great  opportunity.  But  still  true  to  his  leading 
motive,  Shakespeare,  in  King  Henry  the  Fourth,  has 
left  the  high-water  mark  of  his  poetry  in  the  soliloquy 
which  represents  royalty  longing  vainly  for  the  toiler's 
sleep  ;  while  the  popularity,  the  showy  heroism,  of 
Henry  the  Fifth,  is  used  to  give  emphatic  point  to 
the  old  earthy  commonplace  about  "  wild  oats."  The 
wealth  of  homely  humour  in  these  plays,  the  fun 
coming  straight  home  to  all  the  world,  of  Fluelen 


SHAKESPEARE'S  ENGLISH  KINGS  197 

especially  in  his  unconscious  interview  with  the  king, 
the  boisterous  earthiness  of  Falstaff  and  his  com- 
panions, contribute  to  the  same  effect.  The  keynote 
of  Shakespeare's  treatment  is  indeed  expressed  by 
Henry  the  Fifth  himself,  the  greatest  of  Shakespeare's 
kings. — "  Though  I  speak  it  to  you,"  he  says  incognito, 
under  cover  of  night,  to  a  common  soldier  on  the 
field,  "  I  think  the  king  is  but  a  man,  as  I  am  :  the 
violet  smells  to  him  as  it  doth  to  me  :  all  his  senses 
have  but  human  conditions  ;  and  though  his  affections 
be  higher  mounted  than  ours  yet  when  they  stoop 
they  stoop  with  like  wing."  And,  in  truth,  the  really 
kingly  speeches  which  Shakespeare  assigns  to  him,  as 
to  other  kings  weak  enough  in  all  but  speech,  are 
but  a  kind  of  flowers,  worn  for,  and  effective  only  as 
personal  embellishment.  They  combine  to  one  result 
with  the  merely  outward  and  ceremonial  ornaments 
of  royalty,  its  pageantries,  flaunting  so  naively,  so 
credulously,  in  Shakespeare,  as  in  that  old  medieval 
time.  And  then,  the  force  of  Hotspur  is  but  transient 
youth,  the  common  heat  of  youth,  in  him.  The 
character  of  Henry  the  Sixth  again,  roi  faine'ant,  with 
La  Pucelle  *   for  his    counterfoil,  lay  in  the   direct 

*  Perhaps  the  one  person  of  genius  in  these  English  plays. 

The  spirit  of  deep  prophecy  she  hath, 
Exceeding  the  nine  Sibyls  of  old  Rome  : 
What's  past  and  what's  to  come  she  can  descry. 
O 


198  APPRECIATIONS    • 

course  of  Shakespeare's  design  :  he  has  done  much 
to  fix  the  sentiment  of  the  "  holy  Henry."  Richard 
the  Third,  touched,  like  John,  with  an  effect  of  real 
heroism,  is  spoiled  like  him  by  something  of  criminal 
madness,  and  reaches  his  highest  level  of  tragic  ex- 
pression when  circumstances  reduce  him  to  terms  of 
mere  human  nature. — 

"  A  horse  !     A  horse  !     My  kingdom  for  a  horse  !  " 

The  Princes  in  the  Tower  recall  to  mind  the  lot  of 

young  Arthur : — 

"  I'll  go  with  thee, 
And  find  the  inheritance  of  this  poor  child, 
His  little  kingdom  of  a  forced  grave." 

And  when  Shakespeare  comes  to  Henry  the  Eighth,  it 
is  not  the  superficial  though  very  English  splendour 
of  the  king  himself,  but  the  really  potent  and  ascend- 
ant nature  of  the  butcher's  son  on  the  one  hand,  and 
Katharine's  subdued  reproduction  of  the  sad  fortunes 
of  Richard  the  Second  on  the  other,  that  define  his 
central  interest."3' 

With  a  prescience  of  the  Wars  of  the  Roses,  of 
which  his  errors  were  the  original  cause,  it  is  Richard 

*  Proposing  in  this  paper  to  trace  the  leading  sentiment  in  Shake- 
speare's English  Plays  as  a  sort  of popular  dramatic  chronicle,  I  have  left 
untouched  the  question  how  much  (or,  in  the  case  of  Henry  the  Sixth 
and  Henry  the  Eighth,  how  little)  of  them  may  be  really  his  :  how  far 
inferior  hands  have  contributed  to  a  result,  true  on  the  whole  to  the 
greater,  that  is  to  say,  the  Shakespearian,  elements  in  them. 


SHAKESPEARE'S  ENGLISH  KINGS  199 

who  best  exposes  Shakespeare's  own  constant  senti- 
ment concerning  war,  and  especially  that  sort  of  civil 
war  which  was  then  recent  in  English  memories. 
The  soul  of  Shakespeare,  certainly,  was  not  wanting 
in  a  sense  of  the  magnanimity  of  warriors.  The 
grandiose  aspects  of  war,  its  magnificent  apparelling, 
he  records  monumentally  enough — the  "  dressing  of 
the  lists,"  the  lion's  heart,  its  unfaltering  haste  thither 
in  all  the  freshness  of  youth  and  morning. — 

"  Not  sick  although  I  have  to  do  with  death — 
The  sun  doth  gild  our  armour  :      Up,  my  Lords  ! — 
I  saw  young  Harry  with  his  beaver  on, 
His  cuisses  on  his  thighs,  gallantly  arm'd, 
Rise  from  the  ground  like  feather'd  Mercury." 

Only,  with  Shakespeare,  the  afterthought  is  im- 
mediate : — 

"  They  come  like  sacrifices  in  their  trim. 

— Will  it  never  be  to-day  ?  I  will  trot  to-morrow  a  mile,  and 
my  way  shall  be  paved  with  English  faces." 

This  sentiment  Richard  reiterates  very  plaintively,  in 
association  with  the  delicate  sweetness  of  the  English 
fields,  still  sweet  and  fresh,  like  London  and  her 
other  fair  towns  in  that  England  of  Chaucer,  for 
whose  soil  the  exiled  Bolingbroke  is  made  to  long  so 
dangerously,  while  Richard  on  his  return  from  Ireland 

salutes  it — 

"  That  pale,  that  white-fac'd  shore, — 
As  a  long-parted  mother  with  her  child. — 


2oo  APPRECIATIONS 

So,  weeping,  smiling,  greet  I  thee,  my  earth ! 
And  do  thee  favour  with  my  royal  hands." — 

Then  (of  Bolingbroke) 

"  Ere  the  crown  he  looks  for  live  in  peace, 
Ten  thousand  bloody  crowns  of  mothers'  sons 
Shall  ill  become  the  flower  of  England's  face  ; 
Change  the  complexion  of  her  maid-pale  peace 
To  scarlet  indignation,  and  bedew 
My  pastures'  grass  with  faithful  English  blood." — 

"  Why  have  they  dared  to  march  ?" — 
asks  York, 

"  So  many  miles  upon  her  peaceful  bosom, 
Frighting  her  pale-fac'd  visages  with  war  ?" — 

waking,  according  to  Richard, 

"  Our  peace,  which  in  our  country's  cradle, 
Draws  the  sweet  infant  breath  of  gentle  sleep  : " — 

bedrenching  "  with  crimson  tempest " 

"The  fresh  green  lap  of  fair  king  Richard's  land  :" — 

frighting  "  fair    peace "  from  "  our    quiet    confines," 
laying 

"  The  summer's  dust  with  showers  of  blood, 
Rained  from  the  wounds  of  slaughtered  Englishmen  : " 

bruising 

"  Her  flowerets  with  the  armed  hoofs 
Of  hostile  paces." 

Perhaps  it  is  not  too  fanciful  to  note  in  this  play  a 
peculiar  recoil  from  the  mere  instruments  of  warfare, 


SHAKESPEARE'S  ENGLISH  KINGS         201 

the  contact  of  the  "  rude  ribs,"  the  "  flint  bosom,"  of 
Barkloughly  Castle  or  Pomfret  or 

"Julius  Caesar's  ill-erected  tower:" 
the 

"  Boisterous  untun'd  drums 
With  harsh-resounding  trumpets'  dreadful  bray 
And  grating  shock  of  wrathful  iron  arms." 

It  is   as  if  the  lax,  soft  beauty  of  the   king   took 
effect,  at  least  by  contrast,  on  everything  beside. 

One  gracious  prerogative,  certainly,  Shakespeare's 
English  kings  possess :  they  are  a  very  eloquent 
company,  and  Richard  is  the  most  sweet-tongued  of 
them  all.  In  no  other  play  perhaps  is  there  such  a 
flush  of  those  gay,  fresh,  variegated  flowers  of  speech 
— colour  and  figure,  not  lightly  attached  to,  but  fused 
into,  the  very  phrase  itself — which  Shakespeare  can- 
not help  dispensing  to  his  characters,  as  in  this  "  play 
of  the  Deposing  of  King  Richard  the  Second,"  an 
exquisite  poet  if  he  is  nothing  else,  from  first  to  last, 
in  light  and  gloom  alike,  able  to  see  all  things  poeti- 
cally, to  give  a  poetic  turn  to  his  conduct  of  them, 
and  refreshing  with  his  golden  language  the  tritest 
aspects  of  that  ironic  contrast  between  the  pretensions 
of  a  king  and  the  actual  necessities  of  his  destiny. 
What  a  garden  of  words  !  With  him,  blank  verse, 
infinitely  graceful,  deliberate,  musical  in  inflexion, 
becomes  indeed  a  true  "verse  royal,"  that  rhyming 


202  APPRECIATIONS 

lapse,  which  to  the  Shakespearian  ear,  at  least  in 
youth,  came  as  the  last  touch  of  refinement  on  it, 
being  here  doubly  appropriate.  His  eloquence 
blends  with  that  fatal  beauty,  of  which  he  was  so 
frankly  aware,  so  amiable  to  his  friends,  to  his  wife, 
of  the  effects  of  which  on  the  people  his  enemies  were 
so  much  afraid,  on  which  Shakespeare  himself  dwells 
so  attentively  as  the  "  royal  blood  "  comes  and  goes 
in  the  face  with  his  rapid  changes  of  temper.  As 
happens  with  sensitive  natures,  it  attunes  him  to  a 
congruous  suavity  of  manners,  by  which  anger  itself 
became  flattering  :  it  blends  with  his  merely  youthful 
hopefulness  and  high  spirits,  his  sympathetic  love 
for  gay  people,  things,  apparel — "his  cote  of  gold 
and  stone,  valued  at  thirty  thousand  marks,"  the 
novel  Italian  fashions  he  preferred,  as  also  with 
those  real  amiabilities  that  made  people  forget  the 
darker  touches  of  his  character,  but  never  tire  of  the 
pathetic  rehearsal  of  his  fall,  the  meekness  of  which 
would  have  seemed  merely  abject  in  a  less  graceful 
performer. 

Yet  it  is  only  fair  to  say  that  in  the  painstaking  "  re- 
vival "  of  King  Richard  the  Second,  by  the  late^Charles 
Kean,  those  who  were  very  young  thirty  years  ago  were 
afforded  much  more  than  Shakespeare's  play  could  ever 
have  been  before — the  very  person  of  the  king  based 
on  the  stately  old  portrait  in  Westminster  Abbey,  "  the 


SHAKESPEARE'S  ENGLISH  KINGS  203 

earliest  extant  contemporary  likeness  of  any  English 
sovereign,"  the  grace,  the  winning  pathos,  the  sym- 
pathetic voice  of  the  player,  the  tasteful  archaeology 
confronting  vulgar  modern  London  with  a  scenic 
reproduction,  for  once  really  agreeable,  of  the  London 
of  Chaucer.  In  the  hands  of  Kean  the  play  became 
like  an  exquisite  performance  on  the  violin. 

The  long  agony  of  one  so  gaily  painted  by 
nature's  self,  from  his  "  tragic  abdication "  till  the 
hour  in  which  he 

"  Sluiced  out  his  innocent  soul  thro'  streams  of  blood," 
was    for  playwrights  a  subject  ready  to  hand,  and 
became  early  the  theme  of  a  popular  drama,  of  which 
some  have  fancied  surviving  favourite  fragments  in 
the  rhymed  parts  of  Shakespeare's  work. 

"  The  king  Richard  of  Yngland 
Was  in  his  flowris  then  regnand  : 
But  his  flowris  efter  sone 
Fadyt,  and  ware  all  undone  :" — 

says  the  old  chronicle.  Strangely  enough,  Shakespeare 
supposes  him  an  over-confident  believer  in  that  divine 
right  of  kings,  of  which  people  in  Shakespeare's  time 
were  coming  to  hear  so  much  ;  a  general  right, 
sealed  to  him  (so  Richard  is  made  to  think)  as  an 
ineradicable  personal  gift  by  the  touch — stream 
rather,  over  head  and  breast  and  shoulders — of  the 
"  holy  oil  "  of  his  consecration  at  Westminster  ;  not, 


204  APPRECIATIONS 

however,  through  some  oversight,  the  genuine  ball 
used  at  the  coronation  of  his  successor,  given,  accorc 
ing  to  legend,  by  the  Blessed  Virgin  to  Saint  Thomas 
of  Canterbury.  Richard  himself  found  that,  it  was 
said,  among  other  forgotten  treasures,  at  the  crisis  of 
his  changing  fortunes,  and  vainly  sought  reconsecration 
therewith — understood,  wistfully,  that  it  was  reserved 
for  his  happier  rival.  And  yet  his  coronation,  by  the 
pageantry,  the  amplitude,  the  learned  care,  of  its 
order,  so  lengthy  that  the  king,  then  only  eleven 
years  of  age,  and  fasting,  as  a  communicant  at  the 
ceremony,  was  carried  away  in  a  faint,  fixed  the  type 
under  which  it  has  ever  since  continued.  And 
nowhere  is  there  so  emphatic  a  reiteration  as  in 
Richard  the  Second  of  the  sentiment  which  those 
singular  rites  were  calculated  to  produce. 

"  Not  all  the  water  in  the  rough  rude  sea 
Can  wash  the  balm  from  an  anointed  king,"  — 

as  supplementing  another,  almost  supernatural,  right. 

— "  Edward's  seven  sons,"  of  whom  Richard's  father 

was  one, 

"  Were  as  seven  phials  of  his  sacred  blood." 

But  this,  too,  in  the  hands  of  Shakespeare,  becomes  for 
him,  like  any  other  of  those  fantastic,  ineffectual, 
easily  discredited,  personal  graces,  as  capricious  in  its 
operation  on  men's  wills  as  merely  physical  beauty, 


SHAKESPEARE'S  ENGLISH  KINGS  205 

kindling  himself  to  eloquence  indeed,  but  only  giving 
double  pathos  to  insults  which  "barbarism  itself" 
might  have  pitied — the  dust  in  his  face,  as  he  returns, 
through  the  streets  of  London,  a  prisoner  in  the  train 
of  his  victorious  enemy. 

"How  soon  my  sorrow  hath  destroyed  my  face !" 

he  cries,  in  that  most  poetic  invention  of  the  mirror 
scene,  which  does  but  reinforce  again  that  physical 
charm  which  all  confessed.  The  sense  of  "  divine 
right"  in  kings  is  found  to  act  not  so  much  as  a 
secret  of  power  over  others,  as  of  infatuation  to 
themselves.  And  of  all  those  personal  gifts  the  one 
which  alone  never  altogether  fails  him  is  just  that 
royal  utterance,  his  appreciation  of  the  poetry  of  his 
own  hapless  lot,  an  eloquent  self-pity,  infecting  others 
in  spite  of  themselves,  till  they  too  become  irresistibly 
eloquent  about  him. 

In  the  Roman  Pontifical,  of  which  the  order  of 
Coronation  is  really  a  part,  there  is  no  form  for  the 
inverse  process,  no  rite  of  "  degradation,"  such  as  that 
by  which  an  offending  priest  or  bishop  may  be 
deprived,  if  not  of  the  essential  quality  of  "  orders," 
yet,  one  by  one,  of  its  outward  dignities.  It  is  as  if 
Shakespeare  had  had  in  mind  some  such  inverted  rite, 
like  those  old  ecclesiastical  or  military  ones,  by  which 
human  hardness,  or  human  justice,  adds  the  last  touch 
of  unkindness  to  the  execution  of  its  sentences,  in  the 


206  APPRECIATIONS 

scene  where  Richard  "  deposes  "  himself,  as  in  some 
long,  agonising  ceremony,  reflectively  drawn  out,  with 
an  extraordinary  refinement  of  intelligence  and  variety 
of  piteous  appeal,  but  also  with  a  felicity  of  poetic 
invention,  which  puts  these  pages  into  a  very  select 
class,  with  the  finest  "vermeil  and  ivory"  work  of 
Chatterton  or  Keats. 

"  Fetch  hither  Richard  that  in  common  view 
He  may  surrender  !  " — 

And  Richard  more  than  concurs  :  he  throws  himself 

into  the  part,  realises  a  type,  falls  gracefully  as  on 

the  world's  stage. — Why  is  he  sent  for  ? 

"  To  do  that  office  of  thine  own  good  will 
Which  tired  majesty  did  make  thee  offer." — 

"  Now  mark  me  !  how  I  will  undo  myself." 

"Hath  Bolingbroke  deposed  thine  intellect ?"  the 
Queen  asks  him,  on  his  way  to  the  Tower : — 
"  Hath  Bolingbroke 
Deposed  thine  intellect  ?  hath  he  been  in  thy  heart  ?" 

And  in  truth,  but  for  that  adventitious  poetic  gold, 

it  would  be  only  "plume-plucked  Richard." — 

"  I  find  myself  a  traitor  with  the  rest, 
For  I  have  given  here  my  soul's  consent 
To  undeck  the  pompous  body  of  a  king." 

He  is  duly  reminded,  indeed,  how 

"  That  which  in  mean  men  we  entitle  patience 
Is  pale  cold  cowardice  in  noble  breasts." 


SHAKESPEARE'S  ENGLISH  KINGS  207 

Yet  at  least  within  the  poetic  bounds  of  Shakespeare's 
play,  through  Shakespeare's  bountiful  gifts,  his  desire 
seems  fulfilled. — 

"  0  !  that  I  were  as  great 
As  is  my  grief." 

And  his  grief  becomes  nothing  less  than  a  central 
expression  of  all  that  in  the  revolutions  of  Fortune's 
wheel  goes  down  in  the  world. 

No  !  Shakespeare's  kings  are  not,  nor  are  meant 
to  be,  great  men  :  rather,  little  or  quite  ordinary- 
humanity,  thrust  upon  greatness,  with  those  pathetic 
results,  the  natural  self-pity  of  the  weak  heightened 
in  them  into  irresistible  appeal  to  others  as  the  net 
result  of  their  royal  prerogative.  One  after  another, 
they  seem  to  lie  composed  in  Shakespeare's  embalm- 
ing pages,  with  just  that  touch  of  nature  about  them, 
making  the  whole  world  akin,  which  has  infused  into 
their  tombs  at  Westminster  a  rare  poetic  grace.  It 
is  that  irony  of  kingship,  the  sense  that  it  is  in  its 
happiness  child's  play,  in  its  sorrows,  after  all,  but 
children's  grief,  which  gives  its  finer  accent  to  all  the 
changeful  feeling  of  these  wonderful  speeches  : — the 
great  meekness  of  the  graceful,  wild  creature,  tamed 
at  last. — 

"  Give  Richard  leave  to  live  till  Richard  die  ! " 


208  APPRECIATIONS 

his  somewhat  abject  fear  of  death,  turning  to  acquies- 
cence at  moments  of  extreme  weariness  : — 

"  My  large  kingdom  for  a  little  grave  ! 
A  little  little  grave,  an  obscure  grave  !  " — 

his  religious  appeal  in  the  last  reserve,  with  its  bold 
reference  to  the  judgment  of  Pilate,  as  he  thinks  once 
more  of  his  "  anointing." 

And  as  happens  with  children  he  attains  con- 
tentment finally  in  the  merely  passive  recognition 
of  superior  strength,  in  the  naturalness  of  the  result 
of  the  great  battle  as  a  matter  of  course,  and  experi- 
ences something  of  the  royal  prerogative  of  poetry 
to  obscure,  or  at  least  to  attune  and  soften  men's 
griefs.  As  in  some  sweet  anthem  of  Handel,  the 
sufferer,  who  put  finger  to  the  organ  under  the  utmost 
pressure  of  mental  conflict,  extracts  a  kind  of  peace 
at  last  from  the  mere  skill  with  which  he  sets  his 
distress  to  music. — 

"  Beshrew  thee,  Cousin,  that  didst  lead  me  forth 
Of  that  sweet  way  I  was  in  to  despair  ! " 

"With  Cain  go  wander  through  the  shades  of 
night ! " — cries  the  new  king  to  the  gaoler  Exton, 
dissimulating  his  share  in  the  murder  he  is  thought 
to  have  suggested  ;  and  in  truth  there  is  something 
of  the  murdered  Abel  about  Shakespeare's  Richard. 
The  fact  seems  to  be  that  he  died  of  "  waste  and  a 


SHAKESPEARE'S  ENGLISH  KINGS  209 

broken  heart : "  it  was  by  way  of  proof  that  his 
end  had  been  a  natural  one  that,  stifling  a  real  fear 
of  the  face,  the  face  of  Richard,  on  men's  minds, 
with  the  added  pleading  now  of  all  dead  faces,  Henry 
exposed  the  corpse  to  general  view  ;  and  Shakespeare, 
in  bringing  it  on  the  stage,  in  the  last  scene  of  his 
play,  does  but  follow  out  the  motive  with  which  he 
has  emphasised  Richard's  physical  beauty  all  through 
it — that  "  most  beauteous  inn,"  as  the  Queen  says 
quaintly,  meeting  him  on  the  way  to  death — residence, 
then  soon  to  be  deserted,  of  that  wayward,  frenzied, 
but  withal  so  affectionate  soul.  Though  the  body 
did  not  go  to  Westminster  immediately,  his  tomb, 

"  That  small  model  of  the  barren  earth 
Which  serves  as  paste  and  cover  to  our  bones,"  * 

the  effigy  clasping  the  hand  of  his  youthful  consort, 
was  already  prepared  there,  with  "  rich  gilding  and 
ornaments,"  monument  of  poetic  regret,  for  Queen 
Anne  of  Bohemia,  not  of  course  the  "  Queen "  of 
Shakespeare,  who  however  seems  to  have  transferred 
to  this  second  wife  something  of  Richard's  wildly 
proclaimed    affection    for    the    first.      In    this    way, 

*  Perhaps  a  double  entendre  : — of  any  ordinary  grave,  as  comprising, 
in  effect,  the  whole  small  earth  now  left  to  its  occupant :  or,  of  such 
a  tomb  as  Richard's  in  particular,  with  its  actual  model,  or  effigy,  of 
the  clay  of  him.  Both  senses  are  so  characteristic  that  it  would  be  a 
pity  to  lose  either. 


210  APPRECIATIONS 

through  the  connecting  link  of  that  sacred  spot, 
our  thoughts  once  more  associate  Richard's  two 
fallacious  prerogatives,  his  personal  beauty  and  his 
"  anointing." 

According  to  Johnson,  Richard  the  Second  is  one 
of  those  plays  which  Shakespeare  has  "  apparently 
revised  ; "  and  how  doubly  delightful  Shakespeare 
is  where  he  seems  to  have  revised !  "  Would  that 
he  had  blotted  a  thousand " — a  thousand  hasty 
phrases,  we  may  venture  once  more  to  say  with  his 
earlier  critic,  now  that  the  tiresome  German  super- 
stition has  passed  away  which  challenged  us  to 
a  dogmatic  faith  in  the  plenary  verbal  inspiration 
of  every  one  of  Shakespeare's  clowns.  Like  some 
melodiously  contending  anthem  of  Handel's,  I  said, 
of  Richard's  meek  "undoing"  of  himself  in  the 
mirror-scene ;  and,  in  fact,  the  play  of  Richard  the 
Second  does,  like  a  musical  composition,  possess  a 
certain  concentration  of  all  its  parts,  a  simple  con- 
tinuity, an  evenness  in  execution,  which  are  rare 
in  the  great  dramatist.  With  Romeo  and  Juliet,  that 
perfect  symphony  (symphony  of  three  independent 
poetic  forms  set  in  a  grander  one  *  which  it  is  the 
merit  of  German  criticism  to  have  detected)  it  be- 
longs to  a  small  group  of  plays,  where,  by  happy 
birth    and      consistent     evolution,     dramatic     form 

*  The  Sonnet :  the  Aubade  :  the  Epithalamium. 


SHAKESPEARE'S  ENGLISH  KINGS  211 

approaches  to  something  like  the  unity  of  a  lyrical 
ballad,  a  lyric,  a  song,  a  single  strain  of  music.  Which 
sort  of  poetry  we  are  to  account  the  highest,  is  perhaps 
a  barren  question.  Yet  if,  in  art  generally,  unity 
of  impression  is  a  note  of  what  is  perfect,  then  lyric 
poetry,  which  in  spite  of  complex  structure  often 
preserves  the  unity  of  a  single  passionate  ejaculation, 
would  rank  higher  than  dramatic  poetry,  where, 
especially  to  the  reader,  as  distinguished  from  the 
spectator  assisting  at  a  theatrical  performance,  there 
must  always  be  a  sense  of  the  effort  necessary  to 
keep  the  various  parts  from  flying  asunder,  a  sense  of 
imperfect  continuity,  such  as  the  older  criticism  vainly 
sought  to  obviate  by  the  rule  of  the  dramatic  "  unities." 
It  follows  that  a  play  attains  artistic  perfection  just 
in  proportion  as  it  approaches  that  unity  of  lyrical 
effect,  as  if  a  song  or  ballad  were  still  lying  at  the 
root  of  it,  all  the  various  expression  of  the  conflict  of 
character  and  circumstance  falling  at  last  into  the 
compass  of  a  single  melody,  or  musical  theme.  As, 
historically,  the  earliest  classic  drama  arose  out  of 
the  chorus,  from  which  this  or  that  person,  this  or 
that  episode,  detached  itself,  so,  into  the  unity  of  a 
choric  song  the  perfect  drama  ever  tends  to  return, 
its  intellectual  scope  deepened,  complicated,  enlarged, 
but  still  with  an  unmistakable  singleness,  or  identity, 
in  its  impression  on  the  mind.     Just  there,  in  that 


2 1 2  AP PRE  CIA  TIONS 

vivid  single  impression  left  on  the  mind  when  all  is 
over,  not  in  any  mechanical  limitation  of  time  and 
place,  is  the  secret  of  the  "  unities" — the  true  imagina- 
tive unity — of  the  drama. 


DANTE  GABRIEL  ROSSETTI 

.  It  was  characteristic  of  a  poet  who  had  ever  some- 
thing about  him  of  mystic  isolation,  and  will  still 
appeal  perhaps,  though  with  a  name  it  may  seem 
now  established  in  English  literature,  to  a  special 
and  limited  audience,  that  some  of  his  poems  had 
won  a  kind  of  exquisite  fame  before  they  were  in 
the  full  sense  published.  The  Blessed  Damozel, 
although  actually  printed  twice  before  the  year 
1870,  was  eagerly  circulated  in  manuscript ;  and  the 
volume  which  it  now  opens  came  at  last  to  satisfy  a 
long-standing  curiosity  as  to  the  poet,  whose  pictures 
also  had  become  an  object  of  the  same  peculiar 
kind  of  interest.  For  those  poems  were  the  work  of 
a  painter,  understood  to  belong  to,  and  to  be  indeed 
the  leader,  of  a  new  school  then  rising  into  note  ; 
and  the  reader  of  to-day  may  observe  already,  in 
The  Blessed  Damozel,  written  at  the  age  of  eighteen, 
a  prefigurement  of  the  chief  characteristics  of  that 
school,    as    he    will    recognise    in    it    also,  in    pro- 

P 


214  APPRECIA  TIONS 

portion  as  he  really  knows  Rossetti,  many  of  the 
characteristics  which  are  most  markedly  personal 
and  his  own.  Common  to  that  school  and  to  him, 
and  in  both  alike  of  primary  significance,  was  the 
quality  of  sincerity,  already  felt  as  one  of  the  charms 
of  that  earliest  poem — a  perfect  sincerity,  taking 
effect  in  the  deliberate  use  of  the  most  direct  and 
unconventional  expression,  for  the  conveyance  ol 
a  poetic  sense  which  recognised  no  conventional 
standard  of  what  poetry  was  called  upon  to  be.  At 
a  time  when  poetic  originality  in  England  might  seem 
to  have  had  its  utmost  play,  here  was  certainly  one 
new  poet  more,  with  a  structure  and  music  of  verse, 
a  vocabulary,  an  accent,  unmistakably  novel,  yet 
felt  to  be  no  mere  tricks  of  manner  adopted  with  a 
view  to  forcing  attention — an  accent  which  might 
rather  count  as  the  very  seal  of  reality  on  one  man's 
own  proper  speech  ;  as  that  speech  itself  was  the 
wholly  natural  expression  of  certain  wonderful  things 
he  really  felt  and  saw.  Here  was  one,  who  had  a 
matter  to  present  to  his  readers,  to  himself  at  least, 
in  the  first  instance,  so  valuable,  so  real  and  definite, 
that  his  primary  aim,  as  regards  form  or  expression 
in  his  verse,  would  be  but  its  exact  equivalence  to 
those  data  within.  That  he  had  this  gift  of  transpar- 
ency in  language — the  control  of  a  style  which  did 
but  obediently  shift  and  shape  itself  to  the  mental 


DANTE  GABRIEL  ROSSETTI  215 

motion,  as  a  well -trained  hand  can  follow  on  the 
tracing-paper  the  outline  of  an  original  drawing 
below  it,  was  proved  afterwards  by  a  volume  of 
typically  perfect  translations  from  the  delightful  but 
difficult  "  early  Italian  poets " :  such  transparency 
being  indeed  the  secret  of  all  genuine  style,  of  all 
such  style  as  can  truly  belong  to  one  man  and  not 
to  another.  His  own  meaning  was  always  personal 
and  even  recondite,  in  a  certain  sense  learned  and 
casuistical,  sometimes  complex  or  obscure  ;  but  the 
term  was  always,  one  could  see,  deliberately  chosen 
from  many  competitors,  as  the  just  transcript  of  that 
peculiar  phase  of  soul  which  he  alone  knew,  precisely 
as  he  knew  it. 

One  of  the  peculiarities  of  The  Blessed  Damozel 
was  a  definiteness  of  sensible  imagery,  which  seemed 
almost  grotesque  to  some,  and  was  strange,  above 
all,  in  a  theme  so  profoundly  visionary.  The  gold 
bar  of  heaven  from  which  she  leaned,  her  hair  yellow 
like  ripe  corn,  are  but  examples  of  a  general  treat- 
ment, as  naively  detailed  as  the  pictures  of  those 
early  painters  contemporary  with  Dante,  who  has ' 
shown  a  similar  care  for  minute  and  definite  imagery  in 
his  verse  ;  there,  too,  in  the  very  midst  of  profoundly 
mystic  vision.  Such  definition  of  outline  is  indeed 
one  among  many  points  in  which  Rossetti  resembles 
the  great  Italian  poet,  of  whom,  led  to  him  at  first 


216  APPRECIATIONS 

by  family  circumstances,  he  was  ever  a  lover — a 
"  servant  and  singer,"  faithful  as  Dante,  "  of  Florence 
and  of  Beatrice " — with  some  close  inward  con- 
formities of  genius  also,  independent  of  any  mere  cir- 
cumstances of  education.  It  was  said  by  a  critic  of 
the  last  century,  not  wisely  though  agreeably  to  the 
practice  of  his  time,  that  poetry  rejoices  in  abstractions. 
For  Rossetti,  as  for  Dante,  without  question  on  his 
part,  the  first  condition  of  the  poetic  way  of  seeing 
and  presenting  things  is  particularisation.  "  Tell  me 
now,"  he  writes,  for  Villon's 

"  Dictes-moy  ou,  n'en  quel  pays, 
Est  Flora,  la  belle  Romaine  " — 

"  Tell  me  now,  in  what  hidden  way  is 
Lady  Flora  the  lovely  Roman  : " 

— "way,"  in  which  one  might  actually  chance  to 
meet  her ;  the  unmistakably  poetic  effect  of  the 
couplet  in  English  being  dependent  on  the  definite- 
ness  of  that  single  word  (though  actually  lighted 
on  in  the  search  after  a  difficult  double  rhyme)  for 
*  which  every  one  else  would  have  written,  like  Villon 
himself,  a  more  general  one,  just  equivalent  to  place 
or  region. 

And  this  delight  in  concrete  definition  is  allied 
with  another  of  his  conformities  to  Dante,  the  really 
imaginative  vividness,  namely,  of  his  personifications 


DANTE   GABRIEL  ROSSETTI  217 

— his  hold  upon  them,  or  rather  their  hold  upon  him, 
with  the  force  of  a  Frankenstein,  when  once  they 
have  taken  life  from  him.  Not  Death  only  and 
Sleep,  for  instance,  and  the  winged  spirit  of  Love, 
but  certain  particular  aspects  of  them,  a  whole 
"  populace  "  of  special  hours  and  places,  "  the  hour  " 
even  "which  might  have  been,  yet  might  not  be," 
are  living  creatures,  with  hands  and  eyes  and  articu- 
late voices. 

"  Stands  it  not  by  the  door — 
Love's  Hour — till  she  and  I  shall  meet ; 
With  bodiless  form  and  unapparent  feet 

That  cast  no  shadow  yet  before, 
Though  round  its  head  the  dawn  begins  to  pour 
The  breath  that  makes  day  sweet  ?  " — 

"  Nay,  why     . 
Name  the  dead  hours  ?     I  mind  them  well : 
Their  ghosts  in  many  darkened  doorways  dwell 
With  desolate  eyes  to  know  them  by."    > 

Poetry  as  a  mania — one  of  Plato's  two  higher 
forms  of  "  divine  "  mania — has,  in  all  its  species,  a 
mere  insanity  incidental  to  it,  the  "defect  of  its 
quality,"  into  which  it  may  lapse  in  its  moment  of 
weakness  ;  and  the  insanity  which  follows  a  vivid 
poetic  anthropomorphism  like  that  of  Rossetti  may 
be  noted  here  and  there  in  his  work,  in  a  forced  and 
almost    grotesque    materialising   of   abstractions,  as 


2 1 8  APPRECIA  TIONS 

Dante  also  became  at  times  a  mere  subject  of  the 
scholastic  realism  of  the  Middle  Age. 

In  Love's  Nocturn  and  The  Stream's  Secret,  con- 
gruously perhaps  with  a  certain  feverishness  of  soul 
in  the  moods  they  present,  there  is  at  times  a  near 
approach    (may   it   be    said  ?)    to    such    insanity   of 

realism — 

"  Pity  and  love  shall  burn 
In  her  pressed  cheek  and  cherishing  hands  ; 
And  from  the  living  spirit  of  love  that  stands 

Between  her  lips  to  soothe  and  yearn, 
Each  separate  breath  shall  clasp  me  round  in  turn 
And  loose  my  spirit's  bands." 

But  even  if  we  concede  this  ;  even  if  we  allow,  in  the 
very  plan  of  those  two  compositions,  something  of 
the  literary  conceit — what  exquisite,  what  novel 
flowers  of  poetry,  we  must  admit  them  to  be,  as 
they  stand  !  In  the  one,  what  a  delight  in  all  the 
natural  beauty  of  water,  all  its  details  for  the  eye  of 
a  painter ;  in  the  other,  how  subtle  and  fine  the 
imaginative  hold  upon  all  the  secret  ways  of  sleep 
and  dreams  !  In  both  of  them,  with  much  the  same 
attitude  and  tone,  Love — sick  and  doubtful  Love — 
would  fain  inquire  of  what  lies  below  the  surface  of 
sleep,  and  below  the  water  ;  stream  or  dream  being 
forced  to  speak  by  Love's  powerful  "  control "  ;  and 
the  poet  would  have  it  foretell  the  fortune,  issue,  and 
event  of  his  wasting  passion.      Such  artifices,  indeed, 


DANTE   GABRIEL  ROSSETTI  219 

were  not  unknown  in  the  old  Provencal  poetry  of  which 
Dante  had  learned  something.  Only,  in  Rossetti  at 
least,  they  are  redeemed  by  a  serious  purpose,  by 
that  sincerity  of  his,  which  allies  itself  readily  to  a 
serious  beauty,  a  sort  of  grandeur  of  literary  work- 
manship, to  a  great  style.  One  seems  to  hear  there 
a  really  new  kind  of  poetic  utterance,  with  effects 
which  have  nothing  else  like  them  ;  as  there  is  no- 
thing else,  for  instance,  like  the  narrative  of  Jacob's 
Dream  in  Genesis,  or  Blake's  design  of  the  Singing  of 
the  Morning  Stars,  or  Addison's  Nineteenth  Psalm. 

With  him  indeed,  as  in  some  revival  of  the  old 
mythopceic  age,  common  things — dawn,  noon,  night 
— are  full  of  human  or  personal  expression,  full  of 
sentiment.  The  lovely  little  sceneries  scattered  up 
and  down  his  poems,  glimpses  of  a  landscape,  not 
indeed  of  broad  open-air  effects,  but  rather  that  of  a 
painter  concentrated  upon  the  picturesque  effect  of 
one  or  two  selected  objects  at  a  time — the  "  hollow 
brimmed  with  mist,"  or  the  "  ruined  weir,"  as  he  sees 
it  from  one  of  the  windows,  or  reflected  in  one  of 
the  mirrors  of  his  "  house  of  life  "  (the  vignettes  for 
instance  seen  by  Rose  Mary  in  the  magic  beryl) 
attest,  by  their  very  freshness  and  simplicity,  to  a 
pictorial  or  descriptive  power  in  dealing  with  the 
inanimate  world,  which  is  certainly  also  one  half  of 
the  charm,  in  that  other,  more  remote  and  mystic, 


220  APPREC1A  TIONS 

use  of  it.  For  with  Rossetti  this  sense  of  lifeless 
nature,  after  all,  is  translated  to  a  higher  service,  in 
which  it  does  but  incorporate  itself  with  some  phase 
of  strong  emotion.  Every  one  understands  how 
this  may  happen  at  critical  moments  of  life  ;  what 
a  weirdly  expressive  soul  may  have  crept,  even  in 
full  noonday,  into  "the  white-flower'd  elder-thicket," 
when  Godiva  saw  it  "  gleam  through  the  Gothic 
archways  in  the  wall,"  at  the  end  of  her  terrible  ride. 
To  Rossetti  it  is  so  always,  because  to  him  life 
is  a  crisis  at  every  moment.  A  sustained  im- 
pressibility towards  the  mysterious  conditions  of 
man's  everyday  life,  towards  the  very  mystery 
itself  in  it,  gives  a  singular  gravity  to  all  his 
work :  those  matters  never  became  trite  to  him. 
But  throughout,  it  is  the  ideal  intensity  of  love 
— of  love  based  upon  a  perfect  yet  peculiar  type  of 
physical  or  material  beauty — which  is  enthroned  in 
the  midst  of  those  mysterious  powers  ;  Youth  and 
Death,  Destiny  and  Fortune,  Fame,  Poetic  Fame, 
Memory,  Oblivion,  and  the  like.  Rossetti  is  one  of 
those  who,  in  the  words  of  Merimee,  se  passionnent 
pour  la  passion,  one  of  Love's  lovers. 

And  yet,  again  as  with  Dante,  to  speak  of  his 
ideal  type  of  beauty  as  material,  is  partly  misleading. 
Spirit  and  matter,  indeed,  have  been  for  the  most 
part  opposed,  with  a  false  contrast  or    antagonism 


DANTE   GABRIEL  ROSSETTI  221 

by  schoolmen,  whose  artificial  creation  those  abstrac- 
tions really  are.  In  our  actual  concrete  experience,  the 
two  trains  of  phenomena  which  the  words  matter  and 
spirit  do  but  roughly  distinguish,  play  inextricably  into 
each  other.  Practically,  the  church  of  the  Middle 
Age  by  its  aesthetic  worship,  its  sacramentalism,  its 
real  faith  in  the  resurrection  of  the  flesh,  had  set 
itself  against  that  Manichean  opposition  of  spirit  and 
matter,  and  its  results  in  men's  way  of  taking  life  ; 
and  in  this,  Dante  is  the  central  representative  of  its 
spirit.  To  him,  in  the  vehement  and  impassioned 
heat  of  his  conceptions,  the  material  and  the  spiritual 
are  fused  and  blent :  if  the  spiritual  attains  the 
definite  visibility  of  a  crystal,  what  is  material  loses 
its  earthiness  and  impurity.  And  here  again,  by 
force  of  instinct,  Rossetti  is  one  with  him.  His 
chosen  type  of  beauty  is  one, 

"  Whose  speech  Truth  knows  not  from  her  thought, 
Nor  Love  her  body  from  her  soul." 

Like  Dante,  he  knows  no  region  of  spirit  which 
shall  not  be  sensuous  also,  or  material.  The  shadowy 
world,  which  he  realises  so  powerfully,  has  still  the 
ways  and  houses,  the  land  and  water,  the  light  and 
darkness,  the  fire  and  flowers,  that  had  so  much  to 
do  in  the  moulding  of  those  bodily  powers  and 
aspects  which  counted  for  so  large  a  part  of  the 
soul,  here. 


222  APPRECIA  TIONS 

For  Rossetti,  then,  the  great  affections  of  persons 
to  each  other,  swayed  and  determined,  in  the  case  of 
his  highly  pictorial  genius,  mainly  by  that  so-called 
material  loveliness,  formed  the  great  undeniable 
reality  in  things,  the  solid  resisting  substance,  in  a 
world  where  all  beside  might  be  but  shadow.  The 
fortunes  of  those  affections — of  the  great  love  so 
determined  ;  its  casuistries,  its  languor  sometimes ; 
above  all,  its  sorrows  ;  its  fortunate  or  unfortunate 
collisions  with  those  other  great  matters  ;  how  it 
looks,  as  the  long  day  of  life  goes  round,  in  the  light 
and  shadow  of  them  :  all  this,  conceived  with  an 
abundant  imagination,  and  a  deep,  a  philosophic,  re- 
flectiveness, is  the  matter  of  his  verse,  and  especially 
of  what  he  designed  as  his  chief  poetic  work,  "  a 
work  to  be  called  The  House  of  Life,"  towards  which 
the  majority  of  his  sonnets  and  songs  were  contri- 
butions. 

The  dwelling-place  in  which  one  finds  oneself  by 
chance  or  destiny,  yet  can  partly  fashion  for  oneself; 
never  properly  one's  own  at  all,  if  it  be  changed  too 
lightly  ;  in  which  every  object  has  its  associations — 
the  dim  mirrors,  the  portraits,  the  lamps,  the  books, 
the  hair -tresses  of  the  dead  and  visionary  magic 
crystals  in  the  secret  drawers,  the  names  and  words 
scratched  on  the  windows,  windows  open  upon 
prospects   the  saddest   or   the  sweetest ;    the  house 


DANTE   GABRIEL  ROSSETTI  223 

one  must  quit,  yet  taking  perhaps,  how  much 
of  its  quietly  active  light  and  colour  along  with  us  ! 
— grown  now  to  be  a  kind  of  raiment  to  one's  body, 
as  the  body,  according  to  Swedenborg,  is  but  the 
raiment  of  the  soul — under  that  image,  the  whole  of 
Rossetti's  work  might  count  as  a  House  of  Life,  of 
which  he  is  but  the  "  Interpreter."  And  it  is  a 
"  haunted  "  house.  A  sense  of  power  in  love,  defying 
distance,  and  those  barriers  which  are  so  much  more 
than  physical  distance,  of  unutterable  desire  pene- 
trating into  the  world  of  sleep,  however  "  lead-bound," 
was  one  of  those  anticipative  notes  obscurely  struck 
in  The  Blessed  Damozel,  and,  in  his  later  work,  makes 
him  speak  sometimes  almost  like  a  believer  in  mes- 
merism. Dream-land,  as  we  said,  with  its  "  phantoms 
of  the  body,"  deftly  coming  and  going  on  love's 
service,  is  to  him,  in  no  mere  fancy  or  figure  of 
speech,  a  real  country,  a  veritable  expansion  of,  or 
addition  to,  our  waking  life  ;  and  he  did  well  perhaps 
to  wait  carefully  upon  sleep,  for  the  lack  of  it  became 
mortal  disease  with  him.  One  may  even  recognise 
a  sort  of  morbid  and  over-hasty  making-ready  for 
death  itself,  which  increases  on  him  ;  thoughts  con- 
cerning it,  its  imageries,  coming  with  a  frequency  and 
importunity,  in  excess,  one  might  think,  of  even  the 
very  saddest,  quite  wholesome  wisdom. 

And  indeed  the  publication  of  his  second  volume 


224  APPRECIATIONS 

of  Ballads  and  Sonnets  preceded  his  death  by  scarcely 
a  twelvemonth.  That  volume  bears  witness  to  the 
reverse  of  any  failure  of  power,  or  falling-off  from  his 
early  standard  of  literary  perfection,  in  every  one  of 
his  then  accustomed  forms  of  poetry — the  song,  the 
sonnet,  and  the  ballad.  The  newly  printed  sonnets, 
now  completing  the  House  of  Life,  certainly  advanced 
beyond  those  earlier  ones,  in  clearness  ;  his  dramatic 
power  in  the  ballad,  was  here  at  its  height ;  while 
one  monumental,  gnomic  piece,  Soothsay,  testifies, 
more  clearly  even  than  the  Nineveh  of  his  first 
volume,  to  the  reflective  force,  the  dry  reason,  always 
at  work  behind  his  imaginative  creations,  which  at 
no  time  dispensed  with  a  genuine  intellectual  struc- 
ture. For  in  matters  of  pure  reflection  also,  Rossetti 
maintained  the  painter's  sensuous  clearness  of  con- 
ception ;  and  this  has  something  to  do  with  the 
capacity,  largely  illustrated  by  his  ballads,  of  telling 
some  red -hearted  story  of  impassioned  action  with 
effect. 

Have  there,  in  very  deed,  been  ages,  in  which  the 
external  conditions  of  poetry  such  as  Rossetti's  were  of 
more  spontaneous  growth  than  in  our  own  ?  The 
archaic  side  of  Rossetti's  work,  his  preferences  in  regard 
to  earlier  poetry,  connect  him  with  those  who  have 
certainly  thought  so,  who  fancied  they  could  have 
breathed  more  largely  in  the  age  of  Chaucer,  or  of 


DANTE   GABRIEL  ROSSETTI  225 

Ronsard,  in  one  of  those  ages,  in  the  words  of 
Stendhal — ces  siecles  de  passions  ou  les  Ames  pouvaient 
se  livrer  franchement  a  la  phis  haute  exaltation,  qnand 
les  passions  qui  font  la  possibility  comme  les  sujets  des 
beaux  arts  existaient.  We  may  think,  perhaps,  that 
such  old  time  as  that  has  never  really  existed  except 
in  the  fancy  of  poets  ;  but  it  was  to  find  it,  that 
Rossetti  turned  so  often  from  modern  life  to  the 
chronicle  of  the  past.  Old  Scotch  history,  perhaps 
beyond  any  other,  is  strong  in  the  matter  of  heroic 
and  vehement  hatreds  and  love,  the  tragic  Mary 
herself  being  but  the  perfect  blossom  of  them  ;  and 
it  is  from  that  history  that  Rossetti  has  taken  the 
subjects  of  the  two  longer  ballads  of  his  second 
volume :  of  the  three  admirable  ballads  in  it,  The 
King's  Tragedy  (in  which  Rossetti  has  dexterously 
interwoven  some  relics  of  James's  own  exquisite 
early  verse)  reaching  the  highest  level  of  dramatic 
success,  and  marking  perfection,  perhaps,  in  this  kind 
of  poetry  ;  which,  in  the  earlier  volume,  gave  us, 
among  other  pieces,  Troy  Town,  Sister  Helen,  and 
Eden  Bower. 

Like  those  earlier  pieces,  the  ballads  of  the  second 
volume  bring  with  them  the  question  »f  the  poetic 
value  of  the  "  refrain  " — 

"  Eden  bower's  in  flower  : 
And  O  the  bower  and  the  hour  !  " 


226  APPRECIATIONS 

— and  the  like.  Two  of  those  ballads — Troy  Town 
and  Eden  Bower,  are  terrible  in  theme ;  and  the 
refrain  serves,  perhaps,  to  relieve  their  bold  aim  at  the 
sentiment  of  terror.  In  Sister  Helen  again,  the  refrain 
has  a  real,  and  sustained  purpose  (being  here  duly- 
varied  also)  and  performs  the  part  of  a  chorus,  as  the 
story  proceeds.  Yet  even  in  these  cases,  whatever  its 
effect  may  be  in  actual  recitation,  it  may  fairly  be 
questioned,  whether,  to  the  mere  reader  their  actual 
effect  is  not  that  of  a  positive  interruption  and 
drawback,  at  least  in  pieces  so  lengthy  ;  and  Rossetti 
himself,  it  would  seem,  came  to  think  so,  for  in  the 
shortest  of  his  later  ballads,  The  White  Ship — that 
old  true  history  of  the  generosity  with  which  a 
youth,  worthless  in  life,  flung  himself  upon  death — 
he  was  contented  with  a  single  utterance  of  the 
refrain,  "  given  out "  like  the  keynote  or  tune  of 
a  chant. 

In  The  King's  Tragedy,  Rossetti  has  worked  upon 
motive,  broadly  human  (to  adopt  the  phrase  of  popular 
criticism)  such  as  one  and  all  may  realise.  Rossetti, 
indeed,  with  all  his  self-concentration  upon  his  own 
peculiar  aim,  by  no  means  ignored  those  general 
interests  which  are  external  to  poetry  as  he  con- 
ceived it ;  as  he  has  shown  here  and  there,  in  this 
poetic,  as  also  in  pictorial,  work.  It  was  but  that, 
in  a    life  to  be  shorter  even  than  the  average,  he 


DANTE  GABRIEL  ROSSETTI  227 

found  enough  to  occupy  him  in  the  fulfilment  of  a 
task,  plainly  "  given  him  to  do. "  Perhaps,  if  one 
had  to  name  a  single  composition  of  his  to  readers 
desiring  to  make  acquaintance  with  him  for  the 
first  time,  one  would  select  :  The  King's  Tragedy 
— that  poem  so  moving,  so  popularly  dramatic,  and 
lifelike.  Notwithstanding  this,  his  work,  it  must  be 
conceded,  certainly  through  no  narrowness  or  egotism, 
but  in  the  faithfulness  of  a  true  workman  to  a  voca- 
tion so  emphatic,  was  mainly  of  the  esoteric  order. 
But  poetry,  at  all  times,  exercises  two  distinct 
functions  :  it  may  reveal,  it  may  unveil  to  every  eye, 
the  ideal  aspects  of  common  things,  after  Gray's  way 
(though  Gray  too,  it  is  well  to  remember,  seemed  in 
his  own  day,  seemed  even  to  Johnson,  obscure)  or  it 
may  actually  add  to  the  number  of  motives  poetic 
and  uncommon  in  themselves,  by  the  imaginative 
creation  of  things  that  are  ideal  from  their  very  birth. 
Rossetti  did  something,  something  excellent,  of  the 
former  kind  ;  but  his  characteristic,  his  really  reveal- 
ing work,  lay  in  the  adding  to  poetry  of  fresh  poetic 
material,  of  a  new  order  of  phenomena,  in  the  creation 
of  a  new  ideal. 


1883. 


FEUILLET'S  'LA  MORTE  ' 

In  his  latest  novel  M.  Octave  Feuillet  adds  two 
charming  people  to  that  chosen  group  of  personages 
in  which  he  loves  to  trace  the  development  of  the 
more  serious  elements  of  character  amid  the  refine- 
ments and  artifices  of  modern  society,  and  which 
make  such  good  company.  The  proper  function  of 
fictitious  literature  in  affording  us  a  refuge  into  a 
world  slightly  better — better  conceived,  or  better 
finished — than  the  real  one,  is  effected  in  most 
instances  less  through  the  imaginary  events  at  which 
a  novelist  causes  us  to  assist,  than  by  the  imaginary 
persons  to  whom  he  introduces  us.  The  situations 
of  M.  Feuillet's  novels  are  indeed  of  a  real  and  in- 
trinsic importance  : — tragic  crises,  inherent  in  the 
general  conditions  of  human  nature  itself,  or  which 
arise  necessarily  out  of  the  special  conditions  of 
modern  society.  Still,  with  him,  in  the  actual  result, 
they  become  subordinate,  as  it  is  their  tendency  to 


'  FEUILLET'S  ' LA   MORTE'  229 

do  in  real  life,  to  the  characters  they  help  to  form. 
Often,  his  most  attentive  reader  will  have  forgotten- 
the  actual  details  of  his  plot ;  while  the  soul,  tried, 
enlarged,  shaped  by  it,  remains  as  a  well-fixed  type 
in  the  memory.  He  may  return  a  second  or  third 
time  to  Sibylle,  or  Le  Journal  dune  Femme,  or  Les 
Amours  de  Philippe,  and  watch,  surprised  afresh,  the 
clean,  dainty,  word-sparing  literary  operation  (word- 
sparing,  yet  with  no  loss  of  real  grace  or  ease)  which, 
sometimes  in  a  few  pages,  with  the  perfect  logic  of  a 
problem  of  Euclid,  complicates  and  then  unravels 
some  moral  embarrassment,  really  worthy  of  a  trained 
dramatic  expert.  But  the  characters  themselves,  the 
agents  in  those  difficult,  revealing  situations,  such  a 
reader  will  recognise  as  old  acquaintances  after  the 
first  reading,  feeling  for  them  as  for  some  gifted  and 
attractive  persons  he  has  known  in  the  actual  world 
— Raoul  de  Chalys,  Henri  de  Lerne,  Madame  de 
Tecle,  Jeanne  de  la  Roche-Ermel,  Maurice  de  Fremeuse, 
many  others  ;  to  whom  must  now  be  added  Bernard 
and  Aliette  de  Vaudricourt. 

"  How  I  love  those  people  !  "  cries  Mademoiselle  de 
Courteheuse,  of  Madame  de  Sevigne  and  some  other 
of  her  literary  favourites  in  the  days  of  the  Grand 
Monarch.  "  What  good  company  !  What  pleasure 
they  took  in  high  things !  How  much  more  worthy 
they  were  than  the  people  who  live  now  ! " — What 

Q 


23o  APPRECIATIONS 

good  company !  That  is  precisely  what  the  admirer 
of  M.  Feuillet's  books  feels  as  one  by  one  he  places 
them  on  his  book-shelf,  to  be  sought  again.  What 
is  proposed  here  is  not  to  tell  his  last  story,  but  to 
give  the  English  reader  specimens  of  his  most  recent 
effort  at  characterisation. 

It  is  with  the  journal  of  Bernard  himself  that  the 
story  opens,  September  187-  Bernard -Maurice 
Hugon  de  Montauret,  Vicomte  de  Vaudricourt,  is  on 
a  visit  to  his  uncle,  the  head  of  his  family,  at  La 
Saviniere,  a  country-house  somewhere  between  Nor- 
mandy and  Brittany.  This  uncle,  an  artificial  old 
Parisian  in  manner,  but  honest  in  purpose,  a  good 
talker,  and  full  of  real  affection  for  his  heir  Bernard, 
is  one  of  M.  Feuillet's  good  minor  characters — one 
of  the  quietly  humorous  figures  with  which  he  relieves 
his  more  serious  company.  Bernard,  with  whom  the 
refinements  of  a  man  of  fashion  in  the  Parisian  world 
by  no  means  disguise  a  powerful  intelligence  culti- 
vated by  wide  reading,  has  had  thoughts  during  his 
tedious  stay  at  La  Saviniere  of  writing  a  history 
of  the  reign  of  Louis  the  Fourteenth,  the  library 
of  a  neighbouring  chateau  being  rich  in  memoirs  of 
that  period.  Finally,  he  prefers  to  write  his  own 
story,  a  story  so  much  more  interesting  to  himself; 
to  write  it  at  a  peculiar  crisis  in  his  life,  the  moment 
when  his  uncle,  unmarried,  but  anxious  to  perpetuate 


FEUILLETS  'LA   MORTE'  231 

his  race,  is  bent  on  providing  him  with  a  wife,  and 
indeed  has  one  in  view. 

The  accomplished  Bernard,  with  many  graces  of 
person,  by  his  own  confession,  takes  nothing  seriously. 
As  to  that  matter  of  religious  beliefs,  "  the  breeze  of 
the  age,  and  of  science,  has  blown  over  him,  as  it  has 
blown  over  his  contemporaries,  and  left  empty  space 
there."  Still,  when  he  saw  his  childish  religious  faith 
departing  from  him,  as  he  thinks  it  must  necessarily 
depart  from  all  intelligent  male  Parisians,  he  wept. 
Since  that  moment,  however,  a  gaiety,  serene  and 
imperturbable,  has  been  the  mainstay  of  his  happily 
constituted  character.  The  girl  to  whom  his  uncle 
desires  to  see  him  united — odd,  quixotic,  intelligent, 
with  a  sort  of  pathetic  and  delicate  grace,  and  herself 
very  religious — belongs  to  an  old-fashioned,  devout 
family,  resident  at  Varaville,  near  by.  M.  Feuillet, 
with  half  a  dozen  fine  touches  of  his  admirable  pencil 
makes  us  see  the  place.  And  the  enterprise  has  at 
least  sufficient  interest  to  keep  Bernard  in  the  country, 
which  the  young  Parisian  detests.  "  This  piquant 
episode  of  my  life,"  he  writes,  "  seems  to  me  to  be 
really  deserving  of  study  ;  to  be  worth  etching  off, 
day  by  day,  by  an  observer  well  informed  on  the 
subject." 

Recognising  in  himself,  though  as  his  one  real 
fault,  that  he  can  take  nothing  seriously  in  heaven 


232  APPRECIATIONS 

or  earth,  Bernard  de  Vaudricourt,  like  all  M.  Feuillet's 
favourite  young  men,  so  often  erring  or  corrupt,  is  a 
man  of  scrupulous  "  honour."  He  has  already  shown 
disinterestedness  in  wishing  his  rich  uncle  to  marry 
again.  His  friends  at  Varaville  think  so  well- 
mannered  a  young  man  more  of  a  Christian  than  he 
really  is  ;  and,  at  all  events,  he  will  never  owe  his 
happiness  to  a  falsehood.  If  he  has.  great  faults, 
hypocrisy  at  least  is  no  part  of  them.  In  oblique 
paths  he  finds  himself  ill  at  ease.  Decidedly,  as  he 
thinks,  he  was  born  for  straight  ways,  for  loyalty  in 
all  his  enterprises  ;  and  he  congratulates  himself  upon 
the  fact. 

In  truth,  Bernard  has  merits  which  he  ignores,  at 
least  in  this  first  part  of  his  journal :  merits  which 
are  necessary  to  explain  the  influence  he  is  able  to 
exercise  from  the  first  over  such  a  character  as 
Mademoiselle  de  Courteheuse.  His  charm,  in  fact, 
is  in  the  union  of  that  gay  and  apparently  wanton 
nature  with  a  genuine  power  of  appreciating  devotion 
in  others,  which  becomes  devotion  in  himself.  With 
all  the  much-cherished  elegance  and  worldly  glitter 
of  his  personality,  he  is  capable  of  apprehending,  of 
understanding  and  being  touched  by  the  presence  of 
great  matters.  In  spite  of  that  happy  lightness  of 
heart,  so  jealously  fenced  about,  he  is  to  be  wholly 
caught  at  last,  as  he  is  worthy  to  be,  by  the  serious, 


FEUILLET'S  'LA   MORTE'  233 

the  generous  influence  of  things.  In  proportion  to 
his  immense  worldly  strength  is  his  capacity  for  the 
immense  pity  which  breaks  his  heart. 

In  a  few  life-like  touches  M.  Feuillet  brings  out, 
as  if  it  were  indeed  a  thing  of  ordinary  existence,  the 
simple  yet  delicate  life  of  a  French  country-house, 
the  ideal  life  in  an  ideal  France.  Bernard  is  paying 
a  morning  visit  at  the  old  turreted  home  of  the  "  pre- 
historic" Courteheuse  family.  Mademoiselle  Aliette 
de  Courteheuse,  a  studious  girl,  though  a  bold  and 
excellent  rider — Mademoiselle  de  Courteheuse,  "  with 
her  hair  of  that  strange  colour  of  fine  ashes  " — has 
conducted  her  visitor  to  see  the  library : 

"  One  day  she  took  me  to  see  the  library,  rich  in  works  of 
the  seventeenth  century  and  in  memoirs  relating  to  that  time. 
I  remarked  there  also  a  curious  collection  of  engravings  of  the 
same  period.  '  Your  father,'  I  observed,  '  had  a  strong  pre- 
dilection for  the  age  of  Louis  the  Fourteenth.' 

"  •  My  father  lived  in  that  age,'  she  answered  gravely.  And 
as  I  looked  at  her  with  surprise,  and  a  little  embarrassed,  she 
added,  '  He  made  me  live  there  too,  in  his  company.' 

"And  then  the  eyes  of  this  singular  girl  filled  with  tears. 
She  turned  away,  took  a  few  steps  to  suppress  her  emotion,  and 
returning,  pointed  me  to  a  chair.  Then  seating  herself  on  the 
step  of  the  book-case,  she  said,  '  I  must  explain  my  father 
to  you.' 

"  She  was  half  a  minute  collecting  her  thoughts :  then, 
speaking  with  an  expansion  of  manner  not  habitual  with  her, 
hesitating,  and  blushing  deeply,  whenever  she  was  about  to 


234  APPRECIATIONS 

utter  a  word  that  might  seem  a  shade  too  serious  for  lips  so 
youthful : — '  My  father,'  she  proceeded,  '  died  of  the  conse- 
quences of  a  wound  he  had  received  at  Patay.  That  may  show 
you  that  he  loved  his  country,  but  he  was  no  lover  of  his  own 
age.  He  possessed  in  the  highest  degree  the  love  of  order  ; 
and  order  was  a  thing  nowhere  to  be  seen.  He  had  a  horror 
of  disorder ;  and  he  saw  it  everywhere.  In  those  last  years, 
especially,  his  reverence,  his  beliefs,  his  tastes,  all  alike  were 
ruffled  to  the  point  of  actual  suffering,  by  whatever  was  done 
and  said  and  written  around  him.  Deeply  saddened  by  the 
conditions  of  the  present  time,  he  habituated  himself  to  find  a 
refuge  in  the  past,  and  the  seventeenth  century  more  particu- 
larly offered  him  the  kind  of  society  in  which  he  would  have 
wished  to  live — a  society,  well-ordered,  polished,  lettered, 
believing.  More  and  more  he  loved  to  shut  himself  up  in  it. 
More  and  more  also  he  loved  to  make  the  moral  discipline  and 
the  literary  tastes  of  that  favourite  age  prevail  in  his  own 
household.  You  may  even  have  remarked  that  he  carried  his 
predilection  into  minute  matters  of  arrangement  and  decoration. 
You  can  see  from  this  window  the  straight  paths,  the  box  in 
patterns,  the  yew  trees  and  clipped  alleys  of  our  garden.  You 
may  notice  that  in  our  garden-beds  we  have  none  but  flowers 
of  the  period — lilies,  rose-mallows,  immortelles,  rose-pinks,  in 
short  what  people  call  parsonage  flowers— des  fleurs  de  cure. 
Our  old  silvan  tapestries,  similarly,  are  of  that  age.  You  see 
too  that  all  our  furniture,  from  presses  and  sideboards,  down 
to  our  little  tables  and  our  arm-chairs,  is  in  the  severest  style 
of  Louis  the  Fourteenth.  My  father  did  not  appreciate  the 
dainty  research  of  our  modern  luxury.  He  maintained  that 
our  excessive  care  for  the  comforts  of  life  weakened  mind  as 
well  as  body.  That,'  added  the  girl  with  a  laugh, — 'that  is 
why  you  find  your  chair  so  hard  when  you  come  to  see  us.' 


FEUILLET'S  'LA   MORTE'  235 

"  Then,  with  resumed  gravity — '  It  was  thus  that  my  father 
endeavoured,  by  the  very  aspect  and  arrangement  of  outward , 
things,  to  promote  in  himself  the  imaginary  presence  of  the 
epoch  in  which  his  thoughts  delighted.  As  for  myself — need 
I  tell  you  that  I  was  the  confidant  of  that  father,  so  well- 
beloved  :  a  confidant  touched  by  his  sorrows,  full  of  indignation 
at  his  disappointments,  charmed  by  his  consolations.  Here, 
precisely — surrounded  by  those  books  which  we  read  together, 
and  which  he  taught  me  to  love — it  is  here  that  I  have  passed 
the  pleasantest  hours  of  my  youth.  In  common  we  indulged 
our  enthusiasm  for  those  days  of  faith ;  of  the  quiet  life  ;  its 
blissful  hours  of  leisure  well-secured  ;  for  the  French  language 
in  its  beauty  and  purity  ;  the  delicate,  the  noble  urbanity,  which 
was  then  the  honour  and  the  special  mark  of  our  country,  but 
has  ceased  to  be  so.' 

"  She  paused,  with  a  little  confusion,  as  I  thought,  at  the 
warmth  of  her  last  words. 

"  And  then,  just  to  break  the  silence,  '  You  have  explained,' 
I  said,  'an  impression  which  I  have  experienced  again  and 
again  in  my  visits  here,  and  which  has  sometimes  reached  the 
intensity  of  an  actual  illusion,  though  a  very  agreeable  one. 
The  look  of  your  house,  its  style,  its  tone  and  keeping,  carried 
me  two  centuries  back  so  completely  that  I  should  hardly  have 
been  surprised  to  hear  Monsieur  le  Prince,  Madame  de  la 
Fayette,  or  Madame  de  Se'vigne'  herself,  announced  at  your 
drawing-room  door.' 

"  '  Would  it  might  be  ! '  said  Mademoiselle  de  Courteheuse. 
'  Ah  !  Monsieur,  how  I  love  those  people  !  What  good  com- 
pany !  What  pleasure  they  took  in  high  things  !  How  much 
more  worthy  they  were  than  the  people  who  live  now  ! '  I 
tried  to  calm  a  little  this  retrospective  enthusiasm,  so  much  to 
the  prejudice  of  my  contemporaries  and  of  myself.     '  Most  truly, 


236  APPRECIATIONS 

Mademoiselle,'  I  said,  '  the  age  which  you  regret  had  its  rare 
.  merits — merits  which  I  appreciate  as  you  do.  But  then,  need 
one  say  that  that  society,  so  regular,  so  choice  in  appearance, 
had,  like  our  own,  below  the  surface,  its  troubles,  its  disorders  ? 
I  see  here  many  of  the  memoirs  of  that  time.  I  can't  tell 
exactly  which  of  them  you  may  or  may  not  have  read,  and  so 
I  feel  a  certain  difficulty  in  speaking.' 

"  She  interrupted  me :  '  Ah ! '  she  said,  with  entire  sim- 
plicity, '  I  understand  you.  I  have  not  read  all  you  see  here. 
But  I  have  read  enough  of  it  to  know  that  my  friends  in  that 
past  age  had,  like  those  who  live  now,  their  passions,  their 
weaknesses,  their  mistakes.  But,  as  my  father  used  to  say  to 
me,  all  that  did  but  pass  over  a  ground  of  what  was  solid  and 
serious,  which  always  discovered  itself  again  anew.  There 
were  great  faults  then  ;  but  there  were  also  great  repentances. 
There  was  a  certain  higher  region  to  which  everything  con- 
ducted—  even  what  was  evil.'  She  blushed  deeply:  then 
rising  a  little  suddenly,  'A  long  speech!' she  said:  'Forgive 
me  !  I  am  not  usually  so  very  talkative.  It  is  because  my 
father  was  in  question  ;  and  I  should  wish  his  memory  to  be 
as  dear  and  as  venerable  to  all  the  rest  of  the  world  as  it  is 
to  me.' " 

We  pass  over  the  many  little  dramatic  intrigues 
and  misunderstandings,  with  the  more  or  less  adroit 
interferences  of  the  uncle,  which  raise  and  lower 
alternately  Bernard's  hopes.  M.  Feuillet  has  more 
than  once  tried  his  hand  with  striking  success  in  the 
portraiture  of  French  ecclesiastics.  He  has  drawn 
none  better  than  the  Bishop  of  Saint-Meen,  uncle  of 
Mademoiselle  de  Courteheuse,  to  whose  interests  he 


FEUILLET'S  'LA   MORTE'  237 

is  devoted.  Bernard  feels  that  to  gain  the  influence 
of  this  prelate  would  be  to  gain  his  cause  ;  and  the 
opportunity  for  an  interview  comes. 

"  Monseigneur  de  Courteheuse  would  seem  to  be  little  over 
fifty  years  of  age :  he  is  rather  tall,  and  very  thin :  the  eyes, 
black  and  full  of  life,  are  encircled  by  a  ring  of  deep  brown. 
His  speech  and  gesture  are  animated,  and,  at  times,  as  if 
carried  away.  He  adopts  frequently  a  sort  of  furious  manner 
which  on  a  sudden  melts  into  the  smile  of  an  honest  man. 
He  has  beautiful  silvery  hair,  flying  in  vagrant  locks  over  his 
forehead,  and  beautiful  bishop's  hands.  As  he  becomes  calm 
he  has  an  imposing  way  of  gently  resettling  himself  in  his 
sacerdotal  dignity.  To  sum  up  :  his  is  a  physiognomy  full  of 
passion,  consumed  with  zeal,  yet  still  frank  and  sincere. 

"  I  was  hardly  seated,  when  with  a  motion  of  the  hand  he 
invited  me  to  speak. 

"'Monseigneur!'  I  said,  'I  come  to  you  (you  understand 
me  ?)  as  to  my  last  resource.  What  I  am  now  doing  is  almost 
an  act  of  despair ;  for  it  might  seem  at  first  sight  that  no 
member  of  the  family  of  Mademoiselle  de  Courteheuse  must 
show  himself  more  pitiless  than  yourself  towards  the  faults  with 
which  I  am  reproached.  I  am  an  unbeliever :  you  are  an 
apostle  !  And  yet,  Monseigneur,  it  is  often  at  the  hands  of 
saintly  priests,  such  as  yourself,  that  the  guilty  find  most  in- 
dulgence. And  then,  I  am  not  indeed  guilty :  I  have  but 
wandered.  I  am  refused  the  hand  of  your  niece  because  I  do 
not  share  her  faith — your  own  faith.  But,  Monseigneur, 
unbelief  is  not  a  crime,  it  is  a  misfortune.  I  know  people 
often  say,  a  man  denies  God  when  by  his  own  conduct  he  has 
brought  himself  into  a  condition  in  which  he  may  well  desire 
that  God  does  not  exist.      In  this  way  he  is  made  guilty,  or, 


238  APPRECIATIONS 

in  a  sense,  responsible  for  his  incredulity.  For  myself, 
Monseigneur,  I  have  consulted  my  conscience  with  an  entire 
sincerity  ;  and  although  my  youth  has  been  amiss,  I  am  certain 
that  my  atheism  proceeds  from  no  sentiment  of  personal 
interest.  On  the  contrary,  I  may  tell  you  with  truth  that  the 
day  on  which  I  perceived  my  faith  come  to  nought,  the  day  on 
which  I  lost  hope  in  God,  I  shed  the  bitterest  tears  of  my  life. ' 
In  spite  of  appearances,  I  am  not  so  light  a  spirit  as  people 
think.  I  am  not  one  of  those  for  whom  God,  when  He  dis- 
appears, leaves  no  sense  of  a  void  place.  Believe  me ! — a 
man  may  love  sport,  his  club,  his  worldly  habits,  and  yet  have 
his  hours  of  thought,  of  self-recollection.  Do  you  suppose 
that  in  those  hours  one  does  not  feel  the  frightful  discomfort 
of  an  existence  with  no  moral  basis,  without  principles,  with 
no  outlook  beyond  this  world  ?  And  yet,  what  can  one  do  ? 
You  would  tell  me  forthwith,  in  the  goodness,  the  compassion, 
which  I  read  in  your  eyes  ;  Confide  to  me  your  objections  to 
religion,  and  I  will  try  to  solve  them.  Monseigneur,  I  should 
hardly  know  how  to  answer  you.  My  objections  are  '  Legion  ! ' 
They  are  without  number,  like  the  stars  in  the  sky :  they  come 
to  us  on  all  sides,  from  every  quarter  of  the  horizon,  as  if  on  the 
wings  of  the  wind  ;  and  they  leave  in  us,  as  they  pass,  ruins  only, 
and  darkness.  Such  has  been  my  experience,  and  that  of  many 
others  ;  and  it  has  been  as  involuntary  as  it  is  irreparable.' 

"'And  I — Monsieur!'  said  the  bishop,  suddenly,  casting 
on  me  one  of  his  august  looks,  '  Do  you  suppose  that  I  am 
but  a  play-actor  in  my  cathedral  church  ?' 

"  '  Monseigneur !' 

"  '  Yes  !  Listening  to  you,  one  would  suppose  that  we  were 
come  to  a  period  of  the  world  in  which  one  must  needs  be 
either  an  atheist  or  a  hypocrite !  Personally,  I  claim  to  be 
neither  one  nor  the  other.' 


FEUILLET'S  'LA   MORTE'  239 

" '  Need  I  defend  myself  on  that  point,  Monseigneur  ? 
Need  I  say  that  I  did  not  come  here  to  give  you  offence  ?' 

"  '  Doubtless  !  doubtless  !  Well,  Monsieur,  I  admit ; — not 
without  great  reserves,  mind  !  for  one  is  always  more  or  less 
responsible  for  the  atmosphere  in  which  he  lives,  the  influences 
to  which  he  is  subject,  for  the  habitual  turn  he  gives  to  his 
thoughts  ;  still,  I  admit  that  you  are  the  victim  of  the  incre- 
dulity of  the  age,  that  you  are  altogether  guiltless  in  your 
scepticism,  your  atheism !  since  you  have  no  fear  of  hard 
words.  Is  it  therefore  any  the  less  certain  that  the  union  of  a 
fervent  believer,  such  as  my  niece,  with  a  man  like  yourself 
would  be  a  moral  disorder  of  which  the  consequences  might  be 
disastrous  ?  Do  you  think  it  could  be  my  duty,  as  a  relative 
of  Mademoiselle  de  Courteheuse,  her  spiritual  father,  as  a 
prelate  of  the  Church,  to  lend  my  hands  to  such  disorder,  to 
preside  over  the  shocking  union  of  two  souls  separated  by  the 
whole  width  of  heaven  ?'  The  bishop,  in  proposing  that 
question,  kept  his  eyes  fixed  ardently  on  mine. 

" '  Monseigneur,'  I  answered,  after  a  moment's  embarrass- 
ment, 'you  know  as  well  as,  and  better  than  I,  the  con- 
dition of  the  world,  and  of  our  country,  at  this  time.  You 
know  that  unhappily  I  am  not  an  exception :  that  men  of 
faith  are  rare  in  it.  And  permit  me  to  tell  you  my  whole 
mind.  If  I  must  needs  suffer  the  inconsolable  misfortune  of 
renouncing  the  happiness  I  had  hoped  for,  are  you  quite  sure 
that  the  man  to  whom  one  of  these  days  you  will  give  your 
niece  may  not  be  something  more  than  a  sceptic,  or  even  an 
atheist  ?' 

"  '  What,  Monsieur  ? ' 

"  '  A  hypocrite,  Monseigneur  !  Mademoiselle  de  Courte- 
heuse is  beautiful  enough,  rich  enough,  to  excite  the  ambition 
of  those  who  may  be  less  scrupulous  than  I.     As  for  me,  if  you 


240  APPRECIATIONS 

now  know  that  I  am  a  sceptic,  you  know  also  that  I  am  a  man 
of  honour  :  and  there  is  something  in  that ! ' 

"  '  A  man  of  honour  ! '  the  bishop  muttered  to  himself,  with 
a  little  petulance  and  hesitation.  '  A  man  of  honour  !  Yes,  I 
believe  it ! '  Then,  after  an  interval,  '  Come,  Monsieur,'  he 
said  gently,  'your  case  is  not  as  desperate  as  you  suppose. 
My  Aliette  is  one  of  those  young  enthusiasts  through  whom 
Heaven  sometimes  works  miracles.'  And  Bernard  refusing  any 
encouragement  of  that  hope  (the  '  very  roots  of  faith  are  dead  ' 
in  him  for  ever)  '  since  you  think  that,'  the  bishop  answers,  '  it 
is  honest  to  say  so.     But  God  has  His  ways  ! '" 

Soon  after,  the  journal  comes  to  an  end  with  that 
peculiar  crisis  in  Bernard's  life  which  had  suggested 
the  writing  of  it.  Aliette,  with  the  approval  of  her 
family,  has  given  him  her  hand.  Bernard  accepts  it 
with  the  full  purpose  of  doing  all  he  can  to  make  his 
wife  as  happy  as  she  is  charming  and  beloved.  The 
virginal  first  period  of  their  married  life  in  their 
dainty  house  in  Paris — the  pure  and  beautiful  picture 
of  the  mother,  the  father,  and  at  last  the  child,  a  little 
girl,  Jeanne — is  presented  with  M.  Feuillet's  usual 
grace.  Certain  embarrassments  succeed ;  the  de- 
velopment of  what  was  ill-matched  in  their  union  ; 
but  still  with  mutual  loyalty.  A  far-reaching  ac- 
quaintance with,  and  reflection  upon,  the  world  and 
its  ways,  especially  the  Parisian  world,  has  gone  into 
the  apparently  slight  texture  of  these  pages.  The 
accomplished  playwright  may  be  recognised  in  the 


FEUILLET'S  'LA   MORTE'  241 

skilful  touches  with  which  M.  Feuillet,  unrivalled,  as 
his  regular  readers  know,  in  his  power  of  breathing 
higher  notes  into  the  frivolous  prattle  of  fashionable 
French  life,  develops  the  tragic  germ  in  the  elegant, 
youthful  household.  Amid  the  distractions  of  a 
society,  frivolous,  perhaps  vulgar,  Aliette's  mind  is 
still  set  on  greater  things  ;  and,  in  spite  of  a  thousand 
rude  discouragements,  she  maintains  her  generous 
hope  for  Bernard's  restoration  to  faith.  One  day,  a  little 
roughly,  he  bids  her  relinquish  that  dream  finally. 
She  looks  at  him  with  the  moist,  suppliant  eyes  of 
some  weak  animal  at  bay.  Then  his  native  goodness 
returns.      In  a  softened  tone  he  owns  himself  wrong. 

"  '  As  to  conversions  ; — no  one  must  be  despaired  of.  Do 
you  remember  M.  de  Ranee  ?  He  lived  in  your  favourite  age  ; 
— M.  de  Ranee.  Well !  before  he  became  the  reformer  of  La 
Trappe  he  had  been  a  worldling  like  me,  and  a  great  sceptic — 
what  people  called  a  libertine.  Still  he  became  a  saint !  It 
is  true  he  had  a  terrible  reason  for  it.  Do  you  know  what  it 
was  converted  him  ? ' 

"Aliette  gave  a  sign  that  she  did  not  know. 

" '  Well !  he  returned  to  Paris  after  a  few  days'  absence. 
He  ran  straight  to  the  lady  he  loved ;  Madame  Montbazon,  I 
think  :  he  went  up  a  little  staircase  of  which  he  had  the  key, 
and  the  first  thing  he  saw  on  the  table  in  the  middle  of  the 
room  was  the  head  of  his  mistress,  of  which  the  doctors  were 
about  to  make  a  post-mortem  examination.' 

"  '  If  I  were  sure,'  said  Aliette,  '  that  my  head  could  have 
such  power,  I  would  love  to  die.' 


242  APPRECIATIONS 

"  She  said  it  in  a  low  voice,  but  with  such  an  accent  of 
loving  sincerity  that  her  husband  had  a  sensation  of  a  sort  of 
painful  disquiet.  He  smiled,  however,  and  tapping  her  cheek 
softly,  '  Folly  ! '  he  said.  '  A  head,  charming  as  yours,  has  no 
need  to  be  dead  that  it  may  work  miracles  ! ' " 

Certainly  M.  Feuillet  has  some  weighty  charges 
to  bring  against  the  Parisian  society  of  our  day. 
When  Aliette  revolts  from  a  world  of  gossip,  which 
reduces  all  minds  alike  to  the  same  level  of  vulgar 
mediocrity,  Bernard,  on  his  side,  can  perceive  there  a 
deterioration  of  moral  tone  which  shocks  his  sense  of 
honour.  As  a  man  of  honour,  he  can  hardly  trust 
his  wife  to  the  gaieties  of  a  society  which  welcomes 
all  the  world  "  to  amuse  itself  in  undress." 

"  It  happened  that  at  this  perplexed  period  in  the  youthful 
household,  one  and  the  same  person  became  the  recipient  both 
of  the  tearful  confidences  of  Madame  de  Vaudricourt  and  those 
of  her  husband.  It  was  the  Duchess  of  Castel-Moret  [she  is 
another  of  M.  Feuillet's  admirable  minor  [sketches]  an  old 
friend  of  the  Vaudricourt  family,  and  the  only  woman  with 
whom  Aliette  since  her  arrival  in  Paris  had  formed  a  kind  of 
intimacy.  The  Duchess  was  far  from  sharing,  on  points  of 
morality,  and  above  all  of  religion,  the  severe  and  impassioned 
orthodoxy  of  her  young  friend.  She  had  lived,  it  is  true,  an 
irreproachable  life,  but  less  in  consequence  of  defined  principles 
than  by  instinct  and  natural  taste.  She  admitted  to  herself 
that  she  was  an  honest  woman  as  a  result  of  her  birth,  and  had 
no  further  merit  in  the  matter.  She  was  old,  very  careful  of 
herself,  and  a  pleasant  aroma  floated    about   her,  below  her 


FEUILLET'S  'LA   MORTE'  243 

silvery  hair.  People  loved  her  for  her  grace — the  grace  of 
another  time  than  ours — for  her  wit,  and  her  worldly  wisdom, 
which  she  placed  freely  at  the  disposal  of  the  public.  Now 
and  then  she  made  a  match  :  but  her  special  gift  lay  rather  in 
the  way  in  which  she  came  to  the  rescue  when  a  marriage 
turned  out  ill.  And  she  had  no  sinecure  :  the  result  was  that 
she  passed  the  best  part  of  her  time  in  repairing  family  rents. 
That  might  '  last  its  time,'  she  would  say.  '  And  then  we  know 
that  what  has  been  well  mended  sometimes  lasts  better  than 
what  is  new.' " 

A  little  later,  Bernard,  in  the  interest  of  Aliette, 
has  chivalrously  determined  to  quit  Paris.  At  Val- 
moutiers,  a  fine  old  place  in  the  neighbourhood  of 
Fontainebleau,  they  established  themselves  for  a 
country  life.  Here  Aliette  tastes  the  happiest  days 
since  her  marriage.  Bernard,  of  course,  after  a  little 
time  is  greatly  bored.  But  so  far  they  have  never 
seriously  doubted  of  their  great  love  for  each  other. 
It  is  here  that  M.  Feuillet  brings  on  the  scene  a  kind 
of  character  new  in  his  books  ;  perhaps  hardly  worthy 
of  the  other  company  there  ;  a  sort  of  female  Mon- 
sieur de  Camors,  but  without  his  grace  and  tenderness, 
and  who  actually  commits  a  crime.  How  would  the 
morbid  charms  of  M.  de  Camors  have  vanished,  if, 
as  his  wife  once  suspected  of  him,  he  had  ever  con- 
templated crime  !  And  surely,  the  showy  insolent 
charms  of  Sabine  de  Tallevaut,  beautiful,  intellectually 
gifted,  supremely  Amazonian,  yet  withal  not  drawn 


244  APPRECIATIONS 

with  M.  Feuillet's  usual  fineness,  scarcely  hold  out  for 
the  reader,  any  more  than  for  Bernard  himself,  in  the 
long  run,  against  the  vulgarising  touch  of  her  cold 
wickedness.  Living  in  the  neighbourhood  of  Val- 
moutiers,  in  a  somewhat  melancholy  abode  (the 
mystery  of  which  in  the  eyes  of  Bernard  adds  to  her 
poetic  charm)  with  her  guardian,  an  old,  rich,  free- 
thinking  doctor,  devoted  to  research,  she  comes  to 
Valmoutiers  one  night  in  his  company  on  the  occasion 
of  the  alarming  illness  of  the  only  child.  They  arrive 
escorted  by  Bernard  himself.  The  little  Jeanne, 
wrapped  in  her  coverlet,  was  placed  upon  the  table  of 
her  play -room,  which  was  illuminated  as  if  for  a 
party.  The  illness,  the  operation  (skilfully  performed 
by  the  old  doctor)  which  restores  her  to  life,  are 
described  with  that  seemingly  simple  pathos  in  which 
M.  Feuillet's  consummate  art  hides  itself.  Sabine 
remains  to  watch  the  child's  recovery,  and  becomes 
an  intimate.  In  vain  Bernard  struggles  against  the 
first  real  passion  of  his  life ; — does  everything  but 
send  its  object  out  of  his  sight.  Aliette  has  divined 
their  secret.  In  the  fatal  illness  which  follows  soon 
after,  Bernard  watches  over  her  with  tender  solici- 
tude ;  hoping  against  hope  that  the  disease  may  take 
a  favourable  turn. 

"  '  My  child,'  he  said  to  her  one  day,  taking  the  hand  which 
she  abandoned  to  him,  '  I  have  just  been  scolding  old  Victoire. 


FEUILLET'S  'LA   MORTE'  245 

She  is  losing  her  head.  In  spite  of  the  repeated  assurances  of 
the  doctors,  she  is  alarmed  at  seeing  you  a  little  worse  than 
usual  to-day,  and  has  had  the  Curt!  sent  for.  Do  you  wish  to 
see  him  ? ' 

"  '  Pray  let  me  see  him  ! ' 

"  She  sighed  heavily,  and  fixed  upon  her  husband  her  large 
blue  eyes,  full  of  anguish — an  anguish  so  sharp  and  so  singular 
that  he  felt  frozen  to  the  marrow. 

"  He  could  not  help  saying  with  deep  emotion,  '  Do  you 
love  me  no  longer,  Aliette  ? ' 

"  '  For  ever  ! '  murmured  the  poor  child. 

"  He  leaned  over  her  with  a  long  kiss  upon  the  forehead. 
She  saw  tears  stealing  from  the  eyes  of  her  husband,  and 
seemed  as  if  surprised." 

Soon  afterwards  Aliette  is  dead,  to  the  profound 
sorrow  of  Bernard.  Less  than  two  years  later  he  has 
become  the  husband  of  Mademoiselle  Tallevaut.  It 
was  about  two  years  after  his  marriage  with  Sabine 
that  Bernard  resumed  the  journal  with  which  we 
began.  In  the  pages  which  he  now  adds  he  seems 
at  first  unchanged.  How  then  as  to  that  story  of  M. 
de  Rance\  the  reformer  of  La  Trappe,  finding  the 
head  of  his  dead  mistress  ;  an  incident  which  the 
reader  of  La  Morte  will  surely  have  taken  as  a 
"  presentiment "  ?  Aliette  had  so  taken  it.  "  A  head 
so  charming  as  yours,"  Bernard  had  assured  her 
tenderly,  "  does  not  need  to  be  dead  that  it  may  work 
miracles  !  " — How,  in  the  few  pages  that  remain,  will 
M.   Feuillet  justify  that,   and  certain  other  delicate 

R 


246  APPRECIA  TIONS 

touches  of  presentiment,  and  at  the  same  time  justify 
the  title  of  his  book  ? 

The  journal  is  recommenced  in  February.  On 
the  twentieth  of  April  Bernard  writes,  at  Valmoutiers  : 

"  Under  pretext  of  certain  urgently  needed  repairs  I  am 
come  to  pass  a  week  at  Valmoutiers,  and  get  a  little  pure  air. 
By  my  orders  they  have  kept  Aliette's  room  under  lock  and  key 
since  the  day  when  she  left  it  in  her  coffin.  To-day  I  re- 
entered it  for  the  first  time.  There  was  a  vague  odour  of  her 
favourite  perfumes.  My  poor  Aliette  !  why  was  I  unable,  as 
you  so  ardently  desired,  to  share  your  gentle  creed,  and  asso- 
ciate myself  to  the  life  of  your  dreams,  the  life  of  honesty  and 
peace  ?  Compared  with  that  which  is  mine  to-day,  it  seems  to 
me  like  paradise.  What  a  terrible  scene  it  was,  here  in  this 
room !  What  a  memory !  I  can  still  see  the  last  look  she 
fixed  on  me,  a  look  almost  of  terror  !  and  how  quickly  she 
died  !  I  have  taken  the  room  for  my  own.  But  I  shall  not 
remain  here  long.  I  intend  to  go  for  a  few  days  to  Varaville. 
I  want  to  see  my  little  girl :  her  dear  angel's  face. 

"  Valmoutiers,  April  22. — What  a  change  there  has  been 
in  the  world  since  my  childhood  :  since  my  youth  even  !  what 
a  surprising  change  in  so  short  a  period,  in  the  moral  atmo- 
sphere we  are  breathing !  Then  we  were,  as  it  were,  impreg- 
nated with  the  thought  of  God — a  just  God,  but  benevolent 
and  fatherlike.  We  really  lived  under  His  eyes,  as  under  the 
eyes  of  a  parent,  with  respect  and  fear,  but  with  confidence. 
We  felt  sustained  by  His  invisible  but  undoubted  presence. 
We  spoke  to  Him,  and  it  seemed  that  He  answered.  And 
now  we  feel  ourselves  alone — as  it  were  abandoned  in  the 
immensity  of  the  universe.  We  live  in  a  world,  hard,  savage, 
full  of  hatred  ;  whose  one  cruel  law  is  the  struggle  for  existence, 


FEUILLETS   'LA   MORTE*  247 

and  in  which  we  are  no  more  than  those  natural  elements,  let 
loose  to  war  with  each  other  in  fierce  selfishness,  without  pity, 
with  no  appeal  beyond,  no  hope  of  final  justice.  And  above  us, 
in  place  of  the  good  God  of  our  happy  youth,  nothing,  any 
more !  or  worse  than  nothing — a  deity,  barbarous  and  ironical, 
who  cares  nothing  at  all  about  us." 

The  aged  mother  of  AHette,  hitherto  the  guardian 
of  his  daughter,  is  lately  dead.  Bernard  proposes  to 
take  the  child  away  with  him  to  Paris.  The  child's 
old  nurse  objects.  On  April  the  twenty-seventh, 
Bernard  writes  : 

"  For  a  moment — for  a  few  moments — in  that  room  where 
I  have  been  shutting  myself  up  with  the  shadow  of  my  poor 
dead  one,  a  horrible  thought  had  come  to  me.  I  had  driven 
it  away  as  an  insane  fancy.  But  now, — yes  !  it  is  becoming  a 
reality.  Shall  I  write  this  ?  Yes  !  I  will  write  it.  It  is  my 
duty  to  do  so  ;  for  from  this  moment  the  journal,  begun  in  so 
much  gaiety  of  heart,  is  but  my  last  will  and  testament.  If  I 
should  disappear  from  the  world,  the  secret  must  not  die  with 
me.  It  must  be  bequeathed  to  the  natural  protectors  of  my 
child.     Her  interests,  if  not  her  life,  are  concerned  therein. 

"  Here,  then,  is  what  passed :  I  had  not  arrived  in  time  to 
render  my  last  duty  to  Madame  de  Courteheuse.  The  family 
was  already  dispersed.  I  found  here  only  Aliette's  brother. 
To  him  I  communicated  my  plan  concerning  the  child,  and  he 
could  but  approve.  My  intention  was  to  bring  away  with 
Jeanne  her  nurse  Victoire,  who  had  brought  her  up,  as  she 
brought  up  her  mother.  But  she  is  old,  and  in  feeble  health, 
and  I  feared  some  difficulties  on  her  part ;  the  more  as  her 
attitude  towards  myself  since  the  death  of  my  first  wife  has 


248  APPRECIA  TIONS 

been  marked  by  an  ill  grace  approaching  to  hostility.  I  took 
her  aside  while  Jeanne  was  playing  in  the  garden. 

«  '  My  good  Victoire,'  I  said,  '  while  Madame  de  Courteheuse 
was  living,  I  considered  it  a  duty  to  leave  her  granddaughter 
in  her  keeping.  Besides,  no  one  was  better  fitted  to  watch 
over  her  education.  At  present  my  duty  is  to  watch  over  it 
myself.  I  propose  therefore  to  take  Jeanne  with  me  to  Paris  ; 
and  I  hope  that  you  may  be  willing  to  accompany  her,  and 
remain  in  her  service.'  When  she  understood  my  intention, 
the  old  woman,  in  whose  hands  I  had  noticed  a  faint  trembling, 
became  suddenly  very  pale.  She  fixed  her  firm,  grey  eyes 
upon  me  :  '  Monsieur  le  Comte  will  not  do  that ! ' 

"  '  Pardon  me,  my  good  Victoire,  that  I  shall  do.  I  appre- 
ciate your  good  qualities  of  fidelity  and  devotion.  I  shall  be 
very  grateful  if  you  will  continue  to  take  care  of  my  daughter, 
as  you  have  done  so  excellently.  But  for  the  rest,  I  intend  to 
be  the  only  master  in  my  own  house,  and  the  only  master  of 
my  child.'  She  laid  a  hand  upon  my  arm :  '  I  implore 
you,  Monsieur,  don't  do  this  !'  Her  fixed  look  did  not  leave 
my  face,  and  seemed  to  be  questioning  me  to  the  very  bottom 
of  my  soul.  '  I  have  never  believed  it,'  she  murmured,  '  No  ! 
I  never  could  believe  it.  But  if  you  take  the  child  away  I 
shall.' 

"  '  Believe  what,  wretched  woman  ?  believe  what  ?' 

"  Her  voice  sank  lower  still.  '  Believe  that  you  knew  how 
her  mother  came  by  her  death ;  and  that  you  mean  the 
daughter  to  die  as  she  did.' 

"  '  Die  as  her  mother  did  ?' 

"  '  Yes  !  by  the  same  hand  !' 

"  The  sweat  came  on  my  forehead.  I  felt  as  it  were  a 
breathing  of  death  upon  me.  But  still  I  thrust  away  from  me 
that  terrible  light  on  things. 


FEUILLET'S  'LA   MORTE'  249 

"'Victoire!'  I  said,  'take  care!  You  are  no  fool:  you 
are  something  worse.  Your  hatred  of  the  woman  who  has 
taken  the  place  of  my  first  wife — your  blind  hatred — has 
suggested  to  you 'odious,  nay  !  criminal  words.' 

"  •  Ah  !  Ah  !  Monsieur  !'  she  cried  with  wild  energy.  '  After 
what  I  have  just  told  you,  take  your  daughter  to  live  with  that 
woman  if  you  dare.' 

"  I  walked  up  and  down  the  room  awhile  to  collect  my 
senses.  Then,  returning  to  the  old  woman,  '  Yet  how  can  I 
believe  you  ?'  I  asked.  '  If  you  had  had  the  shadow  of  a  proof 
of  what  you  give  me  to  understand,  how  could  you  have  kept 
silence  so  long  ?  How  could  you  have  allowed  me  to  contract 
that  hateful  marriage  ? ' 

"  She  seemed  more  confident,  and  her  voice  grew  gentler. 
1  Monsieur,  it  is  because  Madame,  before  she  went  to  God, 
made  me  take  oath  on  the  crucifix  to  keep  that  secret  for  ever.' 

"'Yet  not  with  me,  in  fact, — not  with  me!'  And  I,  in 
turn,  questioned  her ;  my  eyes  upon  hers.  She  hesitated : 
then  stammered  out,  '  True !  not  with  you !  because  she 
believed,  poor  little  soul !  that  .  .   .' 

"  '  What  did  she  believe  ?  That  I  knew  it  ?  That  I  was 
an  accomplice  ?  Tell  me  ! '  Her  eyes  fell,  and  she  made  no 
answer.  '  Is  it  possible,  my  God,  is  it  possible  ?  But  come, 
sit  by  me  here,  and  tell  me  all  you  know,  all  you  saw. 
At  what  time  was  it  you  noticed  anything — the  precise 
moment  ?'  For  in  truth  she  had  been  suffering  for  a  long 
time  past." 

Victoire  tells  the  miserable  story  of  Sabine's 
crime — we  must  pardon  what  we  think  a  not  quite 
worthy  addition  to  the  imaginary  world  M.  Feuillet 
has  called  up  round  about  him,  for  the  sake  of  fully 


250  APPRECIATIONS 

knowing  Bernard  and  Aliette.  The  old  nurse  had 
surprised  her  in  the  very  act,  and  did  not  credit  her 
explanation.      "  Wher^  I  surprised  her,"  she  goes  on  : 

" '  It  may  already  have  been  too  late — be  sure  it  was  not 
the  first  time  she  had  been  guilty — my  first  thought  was  to 
give  you  information.  But  I  had  not  the  courage.  Then  I 
told  Madame.  I  thought  I  saw  plainly  that  I  had  nothing  to 
tell  she  was  not  already  aware  of.  Nevertheless  she  chided 
me  almost  harshly.  "  You  know  very  well,"  she  said,  "  that 
my  husband  is  always  there  when  Mademoiselle  prepares  the 
medicines.  So  that  he  too  would  be  guilty.  Rather  than 
believe  that,  I  would  accept  death  at  his  hands  a  hundred 
times  over!"  And  I  remember,  Monsieur,  how  at  the  very 
moment  when  she  told  me  that,  you  came  out  from  the  little 
boudoir,  and  brought  her  a  glass  of  valerian.  She  cast  on  me 
a  terrible  look  and  drank.  A  few  minutes  afterwards  she  was 
so  ill  that  she  thought  the  end  was  come.  She  begged  me  to 
give  her  her  crucifix,  and  made  me  swear  never  to  utter  a  word 
concerning  our  suspicions.  It  was  then  I  sent  for  the  priest. 
I  have  told  you,  Monsieur,  what  I  know ;  what  I  have  seen 
with  my  own  eyes.  I  swear  that  I  have  said  nothing  but  what 
is  absolutely  true.'  She  paused.  I  could  not  answer  her.  I 
seized  her  old  wrinkled  and  trembling  hands  and  pressed  them 
to  my  forehead,  and  wept  like  a  child. 

"May  10. — She  died  believing  me  guilty!  The  thought 
is  terrible  to  me.  I  know  not  what  to  do.  A  creature  so  frail, 
so  delicate,  so  sweet.  '  Yes  ! '  she  said  to  herself,  '  my  husband 
is  a  murderer ;  what  he  is  giving  me  is  poison,  and  he  knows 
it.'  She  died  with  that  thought  in  her  mind — her  last  thought. 
And  she  will  never,  never  know  that  it  was  not  so ;  that  I  am 
innocent :  that  the  thought  is  torment  to  me :  that  I  am  the 


FEUILLETS  « LA   MORTE*  251 

most  unhappy  of  men.  Ah  !  God,  all-powerful !  if  you  indeed 
exist,  you  see  what  I  suffer.     Have  pity  on  me ! 

"  Ah !  how  I  wish  I  could  believe  that  all  is  not  over 
between  her  and  me ;  that  she  sees  and  hears  me ;  that  she 
knew  the  truth.     But  I  find  it  impossible  !  impossible  ! 

"  June. — That  I  was  a  criminal  was  her  last  thought,  and 
she  will  never  be  undeceived. 

"  All  seems  so  completely  ended  when  one  dies.  All  returns 
to  its  first  elements.  How  credit  that  miracle  of  a  personal 
resurrection  ?  and  yet  in  truth  all  is  mystery, — miracle,  around 
us,  about  us,  within  ourselves.  The  entire  universe  is  but  a 
continuous  miracle.  Man's  new  birth  from  the  womb  of  death 
— is  it  a  mystery  less  comprehensible  than  his  birth  from  the 
womb  of  his  mother  ? 

"  Those  lines  are  the  last  written  by  Bernard  de  Vaudri- 
court.  His  health,  for  some  time  past  disturbed  by  grief,  was 
powerless  against  the  emotions  of  the  last  terrible  trial  imposed 
on  him.  A  malady,  the  exact  nature  of  which  was  not  deter- 
mined, in  a  few  days  assumed  a  mortal  character.  Perceiving 
that  his  end  was  come,  he  caused  Monseigneur  de  Courteheuse 
to  be  summoned, — he  desired  to  die  in  the  religion  of  Aliette. 
Living,  the  poor  child  had  been  defeated :  she  prevailed  in  her 
death." 

Two  distinguished  souls  !  deux  etres  cCe'lite — M. 
Feuillet  thinks — whose  fine  qualities  properly  brought 
them  together.  When  Mademoiselle  de  Courteheuse 
said  of  the  heroes  of  her  favourite  age,  that  their 
passions,  their  errors,  did  but  pass  over  a  ground  of 
what  was  solid  and  serious,  and  which  always  dis- 
covered itself  afresh,  she  was  unconsciously  describing 


252  APPRECIATIONS 

Bernard.  Singular  young  brother  of  Monsieur  de 
Camors — after  all,  certainly,  more  fortunate  than 
he — he  belongs  to  the  age,  which,  if  it  had  great 
faults,  had  also  great  repentances.  In  appearance, 
frivolous  ;  with  all  the  light  charm  of  the  world,  yet 
with  that  impressibility  to  great  things,  according  to 
the  law  which  makes  the  best  of  M.  Feuillet's  char- 
acters so  interesting ;  above  all,  with  that  capacity 
for  pity  which  almost  everything  around  him  tended 
to  suppress ;  in  real  life,  if  he  exists  there,  and 
certainly  in  M.  Feuillet's  pages,  it  is  a  refreshment 
to  meet  him. 

1886. 


POSTSCRIPT 

alvet  Se  7raAcuov  //.ev  oivov,  av#ea  8'  vjxvuiv  vewrepwv 

THE  words,  classical  and  romantic,  although,  like 
many  other  critical  expressions,  sometimes  abused 
by  those  who  have  understood  them  too  vaguely 
or  too  absolutely,  yet  define  two  real  tendencies 
in  the  history  of  art  and  literature.  Used  in  an 
exaggerated  sense,  to  express  a  greater  opposition 
between  those  tendencies  than  really  exists,  they 
have  at  times  tended  to  divide  people  of  taste 
into  opposite  camps.  But  in  that  House  Beautiful, 
which  the  creative  minds  of  all  generations — the 
artists  and  those  who  have  treated  life  in  the  spirit 
of  art — are  always  building  together,  for  the  refresh- 
ment of  the  human  spirit,  these  oppositions  cease  ; 
and  the  Interpreter  of  the  House  Beautiful,  the  true 
aesthetic  critic,  uses  these  divisions,  only  so  far  as 
they  enable  him  to  enter  into  the  peculiarities  of  the 
objects  with  which  he  has  to  do.  The  term  classical, 
fixed,  as  it  is,  to  a  well-defined  literature,  and  a  well- 


254  APPRECIATIONS 

defined  group  in  art,  is  clear,  indeed  ;  but  then  it 
has  often  been  used  in  a  hard,  and  merely  scholastic 
sense,  by  the  praisers  of  what  is  old  and  accustomed, 
at  the  expense  of  what  is  new,  by  critics  who  would 
never  have  discovered  for  themselves  the  charm  of 
any  work,  whether  new  or  old,  who  value  what  is 
old,  in  art  or  literature,  for  its  accessories,  and  chiefly 
for  the  conventional  authority  that  has  gathered  about 
it — people  who  would  never  really  have  been  made 
glad  by  any  Venus  fresh -risen  from  the  sea,  and 
who  praise  the  Venus  of  old  Greece  and  Rome,  only 
because  they  fancy  her  grown  now  into  something 
staid  and  tame. 

And  as  the  term,  classical,  has  been  used  in  a  too 
absolute,  and  therefore  in  a  misleading  sense,  so  the 
term,  romantic,  has  been  used  much  too  vaguely,  in 
various  accidental  senses.  The  sense  in  which  Scott 
is  called  a  romantic  writer  is  chiefly  this  ;  that,  in 
opposition  to  the  literary  tradition  of  the  last  century, 
he  loved  strange  adventure,  and  sought  it  in  the  Middle 
Age.  Much  later,  in  a  Yorkshire  village,  the  spirit  of 
romanticism  bore  a  more  really  characteristic  fruit  in 
the  work  of  a  young  girl,  Emily  Bronte,  the  romance 
of  Withering  Heights  ;  the  figures  of  Hareton  Earn- 
shaw,  of  Catherine  Linton,  and  of  Heathcliffe  — 
tearing  open  Catherine's  grave,  removing  one  side  of 
her  coffin,  that  he  may  really  lie  beside  her  in  death 


POSTSCRIPT  255 

— figures  so  passionate,  yet  woven  on  a  background  of 
delicately  beautiful,  moorland  scenery,  being  typical 
examples  of  that  spirit.  In  Germany,  again,  that 
spirit  is  shown  less  in  Tieck,  its  professional  repre- 
sentative, than  in  Meinhold,  the  author  of  Sidonia  the 
Sorceress  and  the  Amber-  Witch.  In  Germany  and 
France,  within  the  last  hundred  years,  the  term  has 
been  used  to  describe  a  particular  school  of  writers  ; 
and,  consequently,  when  Heine  criticises  the  Romantic 
School  in  Germany — that  movement  which  culmi- 
nated in  Goethe's  Goetz  von  Berlichingen  ;  or  when 
Th£ophile  Gautier  criticises  the  romantic  movement  in 
France,  where,  indeed,  it  bore  its  most  characteristic 
fruits,  and  its  play  is  hardly  yet  over  where,  by  a 
certain  audacity,  or  bizarrerie  of  motive,  united  with 
faultless  literary  execution,  it  still  shows  itself  in 
imaginative  literature,  they  use  the  word,  with 
an  exact  sense  of  special  artistic  qualities,  indeed  ; 
but  use  it,  nevertheless,  with  a  limited  application  to 
the  manifestation  of  those  qualities  at  a  particular 
period.  But  the  romantic  spirit  is,  in  reality,  an 
ever-present,  an  enduring  principle,  in  the  artistic 
temperament ;  and  the  qualities  of  thought  and  style 
which  that,  and  other  similar  uses  of  the  word 
romantic  really  indicate,  are  indeed  but  symp- 
toms of  a  very  continuous  and  widely  working 
influence. 


256  APPRECIA  TIONS 

Though  the  words  classical  and  romantic,  then, 
have  acquired  an  almost  technical  meaning,  in  appli- 
cation to  certain  developments  of  German  and  French 
taste,  yet  this  is  but  one  variation  of  an  old  opposi- 
tion, which  may  be  traced  from  the  very  beginning 
of  the  formation  of  European  art  and  literature. 
From  the  first  formation  of  anything  like  a  standard 
of  taste  in  these  things,  the  restless  curiosity  of  their 
more  eager  lovers  necessarily  made  itself  felt,  in  the 
craving  for  new  motives,  new  subjects  of  interest,  new 
modifications  of  style.  Hence,  the  opposition  be- 
tween the  classicists  and  the  romanticists — between 
the  adherents,  in  the  culture  of  beauty,  of  the  prin- 
ciples of  liberty,  and  authority,  respectively — of 
strength,     and     order    or    what    the    Greeks    called 

KO(TfJLlOT?]S. 

Sainte-Beuve,  in  the  third  volume  of  the  Causeries 
du  Lundi,  has  discussed  the  question,  What  is  meant 
by  a  classic  ?  It  was  a  question  he  was  well  fitted 
to  answer,  having  himself  lived  through  many  phases 
of  taste,  and  having  been  in  earlier  life  an  enthusi- 
astic member  of  the  romantic  school :  he  was  also  a 
great  master  of  that  sort  of  "  philosophy  of  literature," 
which  delights  in  tracing  traditions  in  it,  and  the 
way  in  which  various  phases  of  thought  and  sentiment 
maintain  themselves,  through  successive  modifications, 
from  epoch  to  epoch.      His  aim,  then,  is  to  give  the 


POSTSCRIPT  257 

word  classic  a  wider  and,  as  he  says,  a  more  generous 
sense  than  it  commonly  bears,  to  make  it  expressly 
grandiose  et  fiottant ;  and,  in  doing  this,  he  develops, 
in  a  masterly  manner,  those  qualities  of  measure, 
purity,  temperance,  of  which  it  is  the  especial  function 
of  classical  art  and  literature,  whatever  meaning, 
narrower  or  wider,  we  attach  to  the  term,  to  take 
care. 

The  charm,  therefore,  of  what  is  classical,  in  art  or 
literature,  is  that  of  the  well-known  tale,  to  which  we 
can,  nevertheless,  listen  over  and  over  again,  because 
it  is  told  so  well.  To  the  absolute  beauty  of  its 
artistic  form,  is  added  the  accidental,  tranquil,  charm 
of  familiarity.  There  are  times,  indeed,  at  which 
these  charms  fail  to  work  on  our  spirits  at  all,  because 
they  fail  to  excite  us.  " Romanticism"  says  Stendhal, 
"  is  the  art  of  presenting  to  people  the  literary  works 
which,  in  the  actual  state  of  their  habits  and  beliefs, 
are  capable  of  giving  them  the  greatest  possible 
pleasure  ;  classicism,  on  the  contrary,  of  presenting 
them  with  that  which  gave  the  greatest  possible 
pleasure  to  their  grandfathers."  But  then,  beneath  all 
changes  of  habits  and  beliefs,  our  love  of  that  mere 
abstract  proportion — of  music — which  what  is  classi- 
cal in  literature  possesses,  still  maintains  itself  in  the 
best  of  us,  and  what  pleased  our  grandparents  may  at 
least  tranquillise  us.      The  "  classic  "  comes  to  us  out 


258  APPRECIATIONS 

of  the  cool  and  quiet  of  other  times,  as  the  measure 
of  what  a  long  experience  has  shown  will  at  least 
never  displease  us.  And  in  the  classical  literature  of 
Greece  and  Rome,  as  in  the  classics  of  the  last 
century,  the  essentially  classical  element  is  that 
quality  of  order  in  beauty,  which  they  possess,  indeed, 
in  a  pre-eminent  degree,  and  which  impresses  some 
minds  to  the  exclusion  of  everything  else  in  them. 

It  is  the  addition  of  strangeness  to  beauty,  that 
constitutes  the  romantic  character  in  art ;  and  the 
desire  of  beauty  being  a  fixed  element  in  every 
artistic  organisation,  it  is  the  addition  of  curiosity  to 
this  desire  of  beauty,  that  constitutes  the  romantic 
temper.  Curiosity  and  the  desire  of  beauty,  have 
each  their  place  in  art,  as  in  all  true  criticism. 
When  one's  curiosity  is  deficient,  when  one  is  not  eager 
enough  for  new  impressions,  and  new  pleasures,  one 
is  liable  to  value  mere  academical  proprieties  too 
highly,  to  be  satisfied  with  worn-out  or  conventional 
types,  with  the  insipid  ornament  of  Racine,  or  the 
prettiness  of  that  later  Greek  sculpture,  which  passed 
so  long  for  true  Hellenic  work  ;  to  miss  those  places 
where  the  handiwork  of  nature,  or  of  the  artist,  has 
been  most  cunning ;  to  find  the  most  stimulating 
products  of  art  a  mere  irritation.  And  when  one's 
curiosity  is  in  excess,  when  it  overbalances  the  desire 
of  beauty,  then  one  is  liable  to  value  in  works  of  art 


POSTSCRIPT  259 

what  is  inartistic  in  them  ;  to  be  satisfied  with  what 
is  exaggerated  in  art,  with  productions  like  some 
of  those  of  the  romantic  school  in  Germany ;  not 
to  distinguish,  jealously  enough,  between  what  is 
admirably  done,  and  what  is  done  not  quite  so  well, 
in  the  writings,  for  instance,  of  Jean  Paul.  And  if 
I  had  to  give  instances  of  these  defects,  then  I  should 
say,  that  Pope,  in  common  with  the  age  of  literature 
to  which  he  belonged,  had  too  little  curiosity,  so  that 
there  is  always  a  certain  insipidity  in  the  effect  of 
his  work,  exquisite  as  it  is  ;  and,  coming  down  to  our 
own  time,  that  Balzac  had  an  excess  of  curiosity — 
curiosity  not  duly  tempered  with  the  desire  of  beauty. 
But,  however  falsely  those  two  tendencies  may  be 
opposed  by  critics,  or  exaggerated  by  artists  them- 
selves, they  are  tendencies  really  at  work  at  all 
times  in  art,  moulding  it,  with  the  balance  some- 
times a  little  on  one  side,  sometimes  a  little  on  the 
other,  generating,  respectively,  as  the  balance  inclines 
on  this  side  or  that,  two  principles,  two  traditions, 
in  art,  and  in  literature  so  far  as  it  partakes  of  the 
spirit  of  art.  If  there  is  a  great  overbalance  of 
curiosity,  then,  we  have  the  grotesque  in  art :  if  the 
union  of  strangeness  and  beauty,  under  very  difficult 
and  complex  conditions,  be  a  successful  one,  if  the 
union  be  entire,  then  the  resultant  beauty  is  very 
exquisite,  very  attractive.     With  a   passionate  care 


260  A  PPRECIA  TIONS 

for  beauty,  the  romantic  spirit  refuses  to  have  it, 
unless  the  condition  of  strangeness  be  first  fulfilled. 
Its  desire  is  for  a  beauty  born  of  unlikely  elements, 
by  a  profound  alchemy,  by  a  difficult  initiation,  by 
the  charm  which  wrings  it  even  out  of  terrible  things  ; 
and  a  trace  of  distortion,  of  the  grotesque,  may 
perhaps  linger,  as  an  additional  element  of  expres- 
sion, about  its  ultimate  grace.  Its  eager,  excited 
spirit  will  have  strength,  the  grotesque,  first  of  all — 
the  trees  shrieking  as  you  tear  off  the  leaves  ;  for 
Jean  Valjean,  the  long  years  of  convict  life ;  for 
Redgauntlet,  the  quicksands  of  Solway  Moss  ; 
then,  incorporate  with  this  strangeness,  and  intensified 
by  restraint,  as  much  sweetness,  as  much  beauty, 
as  is  compatible  with  that.  Energique,  frais,  et  dispos 
— these,  according  to  Sainte-Beuve,  are  the  charac- 
teristics of  a  genuine  classic — les  ouvrages  anciens 
ne  sont  pas  classiques  parce  qu'ils  sont  vieux,  mais 
parce  qu'ils  sont  energiques,  frais,  et  dispos.  Energy, 
freshness,  intelligent  and  masterly  disposition  : — these 
are  characteristics  of  Victor  Hugo  when  his  alchemy 
is  complete,  in  certain  figures,  like  Marius  and 
Cosette,  in  certain  scenes,  like  that  in  the  opening 
of  Les  Travaillenrs  de  la  Mer,  where  Deruchette 
writes  the  name  of  Gilliatt  in  the  snow,  on  Christmas 
morning ;  but  always  there  is  a  certain  note  of 
strangeness  discernible  there,  as  well. 


POSTSCRIPT  261 

The  essential  elements,  then,  of  the  romantic  spirit 
are  curiosity  and  the  love  of  beauty  ;  and  it  is  only 
as  an  illustration  of  these  qualities,  that  it  seeks 
the  Middle  Age,  because,  in  the  overcharged  atmo- 
sphere of  the  Middle  Age,  there  are  unworked  sources 
of  romantic  effect,  of  a  strange  beauty,  to  be  won,  by 
strong  imagination,  out  of  things  unlikely  or  remote. 

Few,  probably,  now  read  Madame  de  StaeTs  De 
V Allemagne,  though  it  has  its  interest,  the  interest 
which  never  quite  fades  out  of  work  really  touched 
with  the  enthusiasm  of  the  spiritual  adventurer,  the 
pioneer  in  culture.  It  was  published  in  18 10,  to 
introduce  to  French  readers  a  new  school  of  writers 
— the  romantic  school,  from  beyond  the  Rhine ; 
and  it  was  followed,  twenty -three  years  later,  by 
Heine's  RomantiscJie  Schnle,  as  at  once  a  supplement 
and  a  correction.  Both  these  books,  then,  connect 
romanticism  with  Germany,  with  the  names  especially 
of  Goethe  and  Tieck  ;  and,  to  many  English  readers, 
the  idea  of  romanticism  is  still  inseparably  connected 
with  Germany — that  Germany  which,  in  its  quaint 
old  towns,  under  the  spire  of  Strasburg  or  the 
towers  of  Heidelberg,  was  always  listening  in  rapt 
inaction  to  the  melodious,  fascinating  voices  of  the 
Middle  Age,  and  which,  now  that  it  has  got  Stras- 
burg back  again,  has,  I  suppose,  almost  ceased 
to   exist.      But    neither    Germany,   with    its    Goethe 

s 


262  APPRECIA  TIONS 

and  Tieck,  nor  England,  with  its  Byron  and  Scott, 
is  nearly  so  representative  of  the  romantic  temper 
as  France,  with  Murger,  and  Gautier,  and  Victor 
Hugo.  It  is  in  French  literature  that  its  most 
characteristic  expression  is  to  be  found  ;  and  that,  as 
most  closely  derivative,  historically,  from  such  pecu- 
liar conditions,  as  ever  reinforce  it  to  the  utmost. 

For,  although  temperament  has  much  to  do  with 
the  generation  of  the  romantic  spirit,  and  although 
this  spirit,  with  its  curiosity,  its  thirst  for  a  curious 
beauty,  may  be  always  traceable  in  excellent  art 
(traceable  even  in  Sophocles)  yet  still,  in  a  limited 
sense,  it  may  be  said  to  be  a  product  of  special 
epochs.  Outbreaks  of  this  spirit,  that  is,  come 
naturally  with  particular  periods — times,  when,  in 
men's  approaches  towards  art  and  poetry,  curiosity 
may  be  noticed  to  take  the  lead,  when  men  come 
to  art  and  poetry,  with  a  deep  thirst  for  intellectual 
excitement,  after  a  long  ennui,  or  in  reaction  against 
the  strain  of  outward,  practical  things :  in  the  later 
Middle  Age,  for  instance ;  so  that  medieval  poetry, 
centering  in  Dante,  is  often  opposed  to  Greek  and 
Roman  poetry,  as  romantic  poetry  to  the  classical. 
What  the  romanticism  of  Dante  is,  may  be  estimated, 
if  we  compare  the  lines  in  which  Virgil  describes 
the  hazel-wood,  from  whose  broken  twigs  flows  the 
blood  of  Polydorus,  not  without  the  expression  of  a  real 


POSTSCRIPT  263 

shudder  at  the  ghastly  incident,  with  the  whole  canto 
of  the  Inferno,  into  which  Dante  has  expanded  them, 
beautifying  and  softening  it,  meanwhile,  by  a  senti- 
ment of  profound  pity.  And  it  is  especially  in  that 
period  of  intellectual  disturbance,  immediately  pre- 
ceding Dante,  amid  which  the  romance  languages 
define  themselves  at  last,  that  this  temper  is  mani- 
fested. Here,  in  the  literature  of  Provence,  the  very 
name  of  romanticism  is  stamped  with  its  true  sig- 
nification :  here  we  have  indeed  a  romantic  world, 
grotesque  even,  in  the  strength  of  its  passions,  almost 
insane  in  its  curious  expression  of  them,  drawing  all 
things  into  its  sphere,  making  the  birds,  nay  !  lifeless 
things,  its  voices  and  messengers,  yet  so  penetrated 
with  the  desire  for  beauty  and  sweetness,  that  it 
begets  a  wholly  new  species  of  poetry,  in  which  the 
Renaissance  may  be  said  to  begin.  The  last  century 
was  pre-eminently  a  classical  age,  an  age  in  which,  for 
art  and  literature,  the  element  of  a  comely  order  was 
in  the  ascendant ;  which,  passing  away,  left  a  hard 
battle  to  be  fought  between  the  classical  and  the 
romantic  schools.  Yet,  it  is  in  the  heart  of  this 
century,  of  Goldsmith  and  Stothard,  of  Watteau 
and  the  Siecle  de  Louis  XIV. — in  one  of  its  central, 
if  not  most  characteristic  figures,  in  Rousseau— that 
the  modern  or  French  romanticism  really  originates. 
But,    what    in    the    eighteenth    century    is    but    an 


264  APPRECIATIONS 

exceptional  phenomenon,  breaking  through  its  fair 
reserve  and  discretion  only  at  rare  intervals, 
is  the  habitual  guise  of  the  nineteenth,  breaking 
through  it  perpetually,  with  a  feverishness,  an  in- 
comprehensible straining  and  excitement,  which  all 
experience  to  some  degree,  but  yearning  also,  in  the 
genuine  children  of  the  romantic  school,  to  be 
energique,  frais,  et  dispos — for  those  qualities  of 
energy,  freshness,  comely  order  ;  and  often,  in  Murger, 
in  Gautier,  in  Victor  Hugo,  for  instance,  with  singular 
felicity  attaining  them. 

It  is  in  the  terrible  tragedy  of  Rousseau,  in  fact, 
that  French  romanticism,  with  much  else,  begins  : 
reading  his  Confessions  we  seem  actually  to  assist  at 
the  birth  of  this  new,  strong  spirit  in  the  French  mind. 
The  wildness  which  has  shocked  so  many,  and  the 
fascination  which  has  influenced  almost  every  one,  in 
the  squalid,  yet  eloquent  figure,  we  see  and  hear  so 
clearly  in  that  book,  wandering  under  the  apple- 
blossoms  and  among  the  vines  of  Neuchatel  or  Vevey 
actually  give  it  the  quality  of  a  very  successful  romantic 
invention.  His  strangeness  or  distortion,  his  profound 
subjectivity,  his  passionateness — the  cor  laceratum — 
Rousseau  makes  all  men  in  love  with  these.  Je  ne  suis 
fait  comme  aucun  de  ceux  que  fai  sus.  Mais  si  je  ne 
vaux  pas  mieux,  au  moins  je  suis  autre. — "I  am  not 
made  like  any  one  else  I  have  ever  known  :  yet,  if  I 


POSTSCRIPT  265 

am  not  better,  at  least  I  am  different."  These 
words,  from  the  first  page  of  the  Confessions,  an- 
ticipate all  the  Werthers,  Renes,  Obermanns,  of  the 
last  hundred  years.  For  Rousseau  did  but  anticipate 
a  trouble  in  the  spirit  of  the  whole  world  ;  and 
thirty  years  afterwards,  what  in  him  was  a  pecu- 
liarity, became  part  of  the  general  consciousness.  A 
storm  was  coming  :  Rousseau,  with  others,  felt  it  in 
the  air,  and  they  helped  to  bring  it  down  :  they 
introduced  a  disturbing  element  into  French  litera- 
ture, then  so  trim  and  formal,  like  our  own  literature 
of  the  age  of  Queen  Anne. 

In  1 8 1 5  the  storm  had  come  and  gone,  but  had 
left,  in  the  spirit  of  "  young  France,"  the  ennui  of  an 
immense  disillusion.  In  the  last  chapter  of  Edgar 
Quinet's  Revolution  Francaise,  a  work  itself  full  of 
irony,  of  disillusion,  he  distinguishes  two  books, 
Senancour's  Obermann  and  Chateaubriand's  Genie  du 
Christianisme,  as  characteristic  of  the  first  decade  of 
the  present  century.  In  those  two  books  we  detect 
already  the  disease  and  the  cure — in  Obermann  the 
irony,  refined  into  a  plaintive  philosophy  of  "  indiffer- 
ence " — in  Chateaubriand's  Genie  du  Christianisme, 
the  refuge  from  a  tarnished  actual  present,  a 
present  of  disillusion,  into  a  world  of  strength 
and  beauty  in  the  Middle  Age,  as  at  an  earlier 
period — in  Rent  and  Atala — into  the  free  play  of 


266  A  PPRECIA  TIONS 

them  in  savage  life.  It  is  to  minds  in  this  spiritual 
situation,  weary  of  the  present,  but  yearning  for  the 
spectacle  of  beauty  and  strength,  that  the  works  of 
French  romanticism  appeal.  They  set  a  positive 
value  on  the  intense,  the  exceptional ;  and  a  certain 
distortion  is  sometimes  noticeable  in  them,  as  in 
conceptions  like  Victor  Hugo's  Quasimodo,  or  Gwyn- 
plaine,  something  of  a  terrible  grotesque,  of  the 
macabre,  as  the  French  themselves  call  it ;  though 
always  combined  with  perfect  literary  execution,  as 
in  Gautier's  La  Morte  Amoureuse,  or  the  scene  of  the 
"maimed"  burial -rites  of  the  player,  dead,  of  the 
frost,  in  his  Capitaine  Fracasse — true  "flowers  of  the 
yew."  It  becomes  grim  humour  in  Victor  Hugo's 
combat  of  Gilliatt  with  the  devil-fish,  or  the  incident, 
with  all  its  ghastly  comedy  drawn  out  at  length,  of 
the  great  gun  detached  from  its  fastenings  on  ship- 
board, in  Quatre-Vingt-Treize  (perhaps  the  most 
terrible  of  all  the  accidents  that  can  happen  by  sea) 
and  in  the  entire  episode,  in  that  book,  of  the  Con- 
vention. Not  less  surely  does  it  reach  a  genuine 
pathos  ;  for  the  habit  of  noting  and  distinguishing 
one's  own  most  intimate  passages  of  sentiment  makes 
one  sympathetic,  begetting,  as  it  must,  the  power 
of  entering,  by  all  sorts  of  finer  ways,  into  the  inti- 
mate recesses  of  other  minds  ;  so  that  pity  is  another 
quality  of  romanticism,  both  Victor  Hugo  and  Gautier 


POSTSCRIPT  267 

being  great  lovers  of  animals,  and  charming  writers 
about  them,  and  Murger  being  unrivalled  in  the 
pathos  of  his  Scenes  de  la  Vie  de  Jeunesse.  Penetrat- 
ing so  finely  into  all  situations  which  appeal  to  pity, 
above  all,  into  the  special  or  exceptional  phases  of 
such  feeling,  the  romantic  humour  is  not  afraid  of 
the  quaintness  or  singularity  of  its  circumstances 
or  expression,  pity,  indeed,  being  of  the  essence 
of  humour  ;  so  that  Victor  Hugo  does  but  turn  his 
romanticism  into  practice,  in  his  hunger  and  thirst 
after  practical  Justice  ! — a  justice  which  shall  no 
longer  wrong  children,  or  animals,  for  instance,  by 
ignoring  in  a  stupid,  mere  breadth  of  view,  minute 
facts  about  them.  Yet  the  romanticists  are  antino- 
mian,  too,  sometimes,  because  the  love  of  energy  and 
beauty,  of  distinction  in  passion,  tended  naturally  to 
become  a  little  bizarre,  plunging  into  the  Middle  Age, 
into  the  secrets  of  old  Italian  story.  Are  we  in  the 
Inferno  ? — we  are  tempted  to  ask,  wondering  at 
something  malign  in  so  much  beauty.  For  over  all 
a  care  for  the  refreshment  of  the  human  spirit  by 
fine  art  manifests  itself,  a  predominant  sense  of 
literary  charm,  so  that,  in  their  search  for  the  secret 
of  exquisite  expression,  the  romantic  school  went 
back  to  the  forgotten  world  of  early  French  poetry, 
and  literature  itself  became  the  most  delicate  of  the 
arts — like  "goldsmith's  work,"  says  Sainte-Beuve,  of 


268  APPRECIATIONS 

Bertrand's  Gaspard  de  la  Nuit — and  that  peculiarly 
French  gift,  the  gift  of  exquisite  speech,  argute  loqui, 
attained  in  them  a  perfection  which  it  had  never 
seen  before. 

Stendhal,  a  writer  whom  I  have  already  quoted, 
and  of  whom  English  readers  might  well  know  much 
more  than  they  do,  stands  between  the  earlier  and 
later  growths  of  the  romantic  spirit.  His  novels  are 
rich  in  romantic  quality ;  and  his  other  writings — 
partly  criticism,  partly  personal  reminiscences — are  a 
very  curious  and  interesting  illustration  of  the  needs 
out  of  which  romanticism  arose.  In  his  book  on 
Racine  and  Shakespeare,  Stendhal  argues  that  all  good 
art  was  romantic  in  its  day ;  and  this  is  perhaps 
true  in  Stendhal's  sense.  That  little  treatise,  full  of 
"  dry  light "  and  fertile  ideas,  was  published  in  the 
year  1823,  and  its  object  is  to  defend  an  entire 
independence  and  liberty  in  the  choice  and  treatment 
of  subject,  both  in  art  and  literature,  against  those 
who  upheld  the  exclusive  authority  of  precedent. 
In  pleading  the  cause  of  romanticism,  therefore, 
it  is  the  novelty,  both  of  form  and  of  motive, 
in  writings  like  the  Hernani  of  Victor  Hugo  (which 
soon  followed  it,  raising  a  storm  of  criticism)  that 
he  is  chiefly  concerned  to  justify.  To  be  interest- 
ing and  really  stimulating,  to  keep  us  from  yawn- 
ing even,  art  and  literature  must  follow  the  subtle 


POSTSCRIPT  269 

movements  of  that  nimbly -shifting  Time- Spirit, 
or  Zeit-Geist,  understood  by  French  not  less  than 
by  German  criticism,  which  is  always  modifying 
men's  taste,  as  it  modifies  their  manners  and  their 
pleasures.  This,  he  contends,  is  what  all  great 
workmen  had  always  understood.  Dante,  Shake- 
speare, Moliere,  had  exercised  an  absolute  independ- 
ence in  their  choice  of  subject  and  treatment.  To 
turn  always  with  that  ever-changing  spirit,  yet  to 
retain  the  flavour  of  what  was  admirably  done  in  past 
generations,  in  the  classics,  as  we  say — is  the  problem 
of  true  romanticism.  "  Dante,"  he  observes,  "  was 
pre-eminently  the  romantic  poet.  He  adored  Virgil, 
yet  he  wrote  the  Divine  Comedy,  with  the  episode  of 
Ugolino,  which  is  as  unlike  the  sEneid  as  can  possibly 
be.  And  those  who  thus  obey  the  fundamental 
principle  of  romanticism,  one  by  one  become  classical, 
and  are  joined  to  that  ever-increasing  common  league, 
formed  by  men  of  all  countries,  to  approach  nearer 
and  nearer  to  perfection." 

Romanticism,  then,  although  it  has  its  epochs,  is  in 
its  essential  characteristics  rather  a  spirit  which  shows 
itself  at  all  times,  in  various  degrees,  in  individual 
workmen  and  their  work,  and  the  amount  of  which 
criticism  has  to  estimate  in  them  taken  one  by  one, 
than  the  peculiarity  of  a  time  or  a  school.  Depending 
on  the  varying  proportion  of  curiosity  and  the  desire 


270  A  P PRE  CIA  TIONS 

of  beauty,  natural  tendencies  of  the  artistic  spirit  at  all 
times,  it  must  always  be  partly  a  matter  of  individual 
temperament.  The  eighteenth  century  in  England 
has  been  regarded  as  almost  exclusively  a  classical 
period  ;  yet  William  Blake,  a  type  of  so  much  which 
breaks  through  what  are  conventionally  thought  the 
influences  of  that  century,  is  still  a  noticeable  pheno- 
menon in  it,  and  the  reaction  in  favour  of  naturalism 
in  poetry  begins  in  that  century,  early.  There  are, 
thus,  the  born  romanticists  and  the  born  classicists. 
There  are  the  born  classicists  who  start  with  form, 
to  whose  minds  the  comeliness  of  the  old,  im- 
memorial, well-recognised  types  in  art  and  literature, 
have  revealed  themselves  impressively  ;  who  will 
entertain  no  matter  which  will  not  go  easily  and 
flexibly  into  them  ;  whose  work  aspires  only  to  be 
a  variation  upon,  or  study  from,  the  older  masters. 
"  'Tis  art's  decline,  my  son  !  "  they  are  always  saying, 
to  the  progressive  element  in  their  own  generation  ; 
to  those  who  care  for  that  which  in  fifty  years'  time 
every  one  will  be  caring  for.  On  the  other  hand, 
there  are  the  born  romanticists,  who  start  with  an 
•  original,  untried  matter,  still  in  fusion  ;  who  conceive 
this  vividly,  and  hold  by  it  as  the  essence  of  their 
work  ;  who,  by  the  very  vividness  and  heat  of  their 
conception,  purge  away,  sooner  or  later,  all  that  is 
not  organically  appropriate  to  it,  till  the  whole  effect 
adjusts  itself  in  clear,  orderly,  proportionate  form  ; 


POSTSCRIPT  271 

which  form,  after  a  very  little  time,  becomes  classical 
in  its. turn. 

The  romantic  or  classical  character  of  a  picture, 
a  poem,  a  literary  work,  depends,  then,  on  the 
balance  of  certain  qualities  in  it ;  and  in  this  sense, 
a  very  real  distinction  may  be  drawn  between  good 
classical  and  good  romantic  work.  But  all  critical 
terms  are  relative  ;  and  there  is  at  least  a  valuable 
suggestion  in  that  theory  of  Stendhal's,  that  all  good 
art  was  romantic  in  its  day.  In  the  beauties  of 
Homer  and  Pheidias,  quiet  as  they  now  seem,  there 
must  have  been,  for  those  who  confronted  them  for 
the  first  time,  excitement  and  surprise,  the  sudden, 
unforeseen  satisfaction  of  the  desire  of  beauty.  Yet 
the  Odyssey,  with  its  marvellous  adventure,  is  more 
romantic  than  the  Iliad,  which  nevertheless  contains, 
among  many  other  romantic  episodes,  that  of  the  im- 
,  mortal  horses  of  Achilles,  who  weep  at  the  death  of 
Patroclus.  vEschylus  is  more  romantic  than  Sopho- 
cles, whose  Philoctetes,  were  it  written  now,  might 
figure,  for  the  strangeness  of  its  motive  and  the  per- 
fectness  of  its  execution,  as  typically  romantic  ;  while, 
of  Euripides,  it  may  be  said,  that  his  method  in  writing 
his  plays  is  to  sacrifice  readily  almost  everything  else, 
so  that  he  may  attain  the  fulness  of  a  single  romantic 
effect.  These  two  tendencies,  indeed,  might  be 
applied  as  a  measure  or  standard,  all  through  Greek 
and   Roman  art  and  poetry,  with  very  illuminating 


272  APPRECIA  TIONS 

results  ;  and  for  an  analyst  of  the  romantic  principle 
in  art,  no  exercise  would  be  more  profitable,  than  to 
walk  through  the  collection  of  classical  antiquities  at 
the  Louvre,  or  the  British  Museum,  or  to  examine 
some  representative  collection  of  Greek  coins,  and 
note  how  the  element  of  curiosity,  of  the  love  of. 
strangeness,  insinuates  itself  into  classical  design,  and 
record  the  effects  of  the  romantic  spirit  there,  the 
traces  of  struggle,  of  the  grotesque  even,  though  over- 
balanced here  by  sweetness  ;  as  in  the  sculpture  of 
Chartres  and  Rheims,  the  real  sweetness  of  mind  in 
the  sculptor  is  often  overbalanced  by  the  grotesque, 
by  the  rudeness  of  his  strength. 

Classicism,  then,  means  for  Stendhal,  for  that 
younger  enthusiastic  band  of  French  writers  whose 
unconscious  method  he  formulated  into  principles,  the 
reign  of  what  is  pedantic,  conventional,  and  narrowly 
academical  in  art ;  for  him,  all  good  art  is  romantic. 
To  Sainte-Beuve,  who  understands  the  term  in  a 
more  liberal  sense,  it  is  the  characteristic  of  certain 
epochs,  of  certain  spirits  in  every  epoch,  not  given 
to  the  exercise  of  original  imagination,  but  rather 
to  the  working  out  of  refinements  of  manner  on  some 
authorised  matter  ;  and  who  bring  to  their  perfection, 
in  this  way,  the  elements  of  sanity,  of  order  and 
beauty  in  manner.  In  general  criticism,  again,  it 
means  the  spirit  of  Greece  and  Rome,  of  some 
phases  in  literature  and  art  that  may  seem  of  equal 


POSTSCRIPT  273 

authority  with  Greece  and  Rome,  the  age  of  Louis 
the  Fourteenth,  the  age  of  Johnson  ;  though  this 
is  at  best  an  uncritical  use  of  the  term,  because  in 
Greek  and  Roman  work  there  are  typical  examples 
of  the  romantic  spirit.  But  explain  the  terms  as  we 
.may,  in  application  to  particular  epochs,  there  are 
these  two  elements  always  recognisable  ;  united  in 
perfect  art — in  Sophocles,  in  Dante,  in  the  highest 
work  of  Goethe,  though  not  always  absolutely 
balanced  there  ;  and  these  two  elements  may  be  not 
inappropriately  termed  the  classical  and  romantic 
tendencies. 

Material  for  the  artist,  motives  of  inspiration,  are 
not  yet  exhausted  :  our  curious,  complex,  aspiring 
age  still  abounds  in  subjects  for  aesthetic  mani- 
pulation by  the  literary  as  well  as  by  other  forms  of 
art.  For  the  literary  art,  at  all  events,  the  problem 
just  now  is,  to  induce  order  upon  the  contorted, 
proportionless  accumulation  of  our  knowledge  and 
experience,  our  science  and  history,  our  hopes  and 
disillusion,  and,  in  effecting  this,  to  do  consciously 
what  has  been  done  hitherto  for  the  most  part  too 
unconsciously,  to  write  our  English  language  as  the 
Latins  wrote  theirs,  as  the  French  write,  as  scholars 
should  write.  Appealing,  as  he  may,  to  precedent  in 
this  matter,  the  scholar  will  still  remember  that  if 
"  the  style  is  the  man  "  it  is  also  the  age :  that  the 


274  APPRECIATIONS 

nineteenth  century  too  will  be  found  to  have  had  its 
style,  justified  by  necessity — a  style  very  different, 
alike  from  the  baldness  of  an  impossible  "  Queen 
Anne"  revival,  and  an  incorrect,  incondite  exuberance, 
after  the  mode  of  Elizabeth  :  that  we  can  only  return 
to  either  at  the  price  of  an  impoverishment  of  form 
or  matter,  or  both,  although,  an  intellectually  rich 
age  such  as  ours  being  necessarily  an  eclectic  one, 
we  may  well  cultivate  some  of  the  excellences  of 
literary  types  so  different  as  those  :  that  in  literature 
as  in  other  matters  it  is  well  to  unite  as  many  diverse 
elements  as  may  be :  that  the  individual  writer  or 
artist,  certainly,  is  to  be  estimated  by  the  number 
of  graces  he  combines,  and  his  power  of  interpene- 
trating them  in  a  given  work.  To  discriminate 
schools,  of  art,  of  literature,  is,  of  course,  part  of  the 
obvious  business  of  literary  criticism  :  but,  in  the 
work  of  literary  production,  it  is  easy  to  be  overmuch 
occupied  concerning  them.  For,  in  truth,  the  legiti- 
mate contention  is,  not  of  one  age  or  school  of  literary 
art  against  another,  but  of  all  successive  schools 
alike,  against  the  stupidity  which  is  dead  to  the 
substance,  and  the  vulgarity  which  is  dead  to  form. 


Printed  by  R.  &  R.  Clark,  Edinburgh. 


MESSRS.  MAC  MILL  AN  AND  CO.'S  PUBLICATIONS 


BY  THE  SAME  AUTHOR. 

MARIUS  THE  EPICUREAN :  His  Sensations 
and  Ideas.     Two  Vols.     Second  Edition.      12s. 

"A  singularly  attractive  book." — Spectator. 

"One  of  the  most  remarkable,  and,  to  the  right  reader,  one  of  the 
most  interesting  books  of  the  decade. " — Harper's  Magazine. 

**  With  a  beauty  of  phrase  hardly  inferior,  if  inferior  at  all,  to  that  of 
the  famous,  or  should-be  famous,  passage  on  Monna  Lisa,  which  has 
been  for  a  dozen  years  the  delight  of  all  who  care  for  English  style, 
there  is  in  •  Marius  the  Epicurean '  a  gravity  of  thought  and  tone  which 
almost  amounts  to  severity.  .  .  .  The  extraordinary  quietness  of  which 
Mr.  Pater  has  the  secret  also  reappears  here  to  the  full ;  the  fulness  of 
colour  which  is  somehow  never  staring,  the  brilliancy  which  never 
dazzles." — Pall  Mall  Gazette. 

"  The  narrative  is  pictorial,  almost  to  the  point  of  decoration,  and 
moves  always  with  an  outlook  on  some  fair  sight.  .  .  .  Independently 
of  all  that  has  been  said,  any  one  who  cares  to  think  on  counsels  of  per- 
fection for  man's  life  will  find  profound  and  original  thought  about  the 
ideal  elements  still  at  hand  in  modern  days  for  use,  and  many  wise 
reflections  sown  along  these  pages.  It  is  a  rare  work,  and  not  carelessly 
to  be  read.  Some  exquisiteness  of  taste,  some  delight  in  scholarship, 
some  knowledge  of  what  is  best  worth  knowing  in  the  historic  expres- 
sion of  man's  aspirations,  and,  above  all,  that  inward  tacitness  of  mind 
the  reader  must  bring  to  its  perusal." — Nation  {New  York). 

"There  are  some  half-dozen  scenes,  which  in  their  own  way  are 
unrivalled,  where  both  thought  and  expression  are  elaborated  with  a 
sort  of  loving,  lingering  care,  while  yet  the  general  impression  is  one  of 
subdued  and  measured  charm,  of  a  fastidious  self-control  in  the  writer, 
leading  to  a  singular  gentleness  and  purity  of  presentation.  ...  It  is 
so  full  of  exquisite  work,  of  thought  fresh  from  heart  and  brain,  that 
when  the  reader  has  made  all  his  reservations,  and  steadily  refused  his 
adhesion  to  this  or  that  appeal  which  it  contains,  he  will  come  back 
with  fresh  delight  to  the  passages,  and  descriptions,  and  reveries,  in 
which  a  poetical  and  meditative  nature  has  poured  out  a  wealth  of 
imaginative  reflection." — Macmillan's  Magazine. 

"  Nothing,  for  example,  can  be  more  graceful  than  the  romantic 
version  of  the  loves  of  Psyche  and  Cupid,  freely  translated  from  Apu- 
leius.  Nothing  can  be  more  admirable  as  an  eloquent  illustration  of 
character,  as  a  presentment  of  the  higher  intellectual  thought  of  the 
time,  than  the  discourses  of  the  Emperor  Marcus  Aurelius.  But  what 
please  us  the  most,  after  all,  are  some  of  those  graceful  and  graphic 
descriptions  of  scenery  we  have  praised  already,  and  we  can  hardly  give 


MESSRS.  MACMILLAN  AND  CO. 'S  PUBLICATIONS 

a  better  idea  of  the  book  than  by  concluding  our  notice  with  one  or  two 
of  these  taken  at  random.  For  their  sparkle  is  broadcast  over  the  pages, 
and  all  are  gems  in  their  way." — Times. 

"A  more  'subjective'  book  could  scarcely  be  written,  yet  the  pic- 
tures of  ancient  life  and  old  aspects  of  Italy  which  it  contains  are 
numerous  and  beautiful  enough  to  attract  even  readers  who  do  not 
hanker  after  mysticism.  .  .  .  With  readers  who  have  some  elements  of 
mysticism  in  their  natures  '  Marius  the  Epicurean  '  will  be  a  treasured 
favourite.  They  will  place  the  record  of  his  sensations  and  ideas  on  the 
same  shelf  as  Rousseau's  '  Confessions '  and  the  '  Thoughts  of  the  Em- 
peror Marcus  Aurelius  Antoninus.'  This  will  be  the  reward  of  the  deep 
thought,  prolonged  and  judicious  study,  and  extreme  elaborateness  of 
style  which  Mr.  Pater  has  bestowed  on  his  new  volumes." — Saturday 
Review. 

IMAGINARY  PORTRAITS.     6s. 

"  Mr.  Pater  is  an  intellectual  impressionist.  .  .  .  He  is  always  look- 
ing for  exquisite  moments,  and,  when  he  has  found  them,  he  analyzes 
them  with  delicate  and  delightful  art,  and  then  passes  on,  often  to  the 
opposite  pole  of  thought  or  feeling,  knowing  that  every  word  has  its  own 
quality  and  charm.  .  .  .  Though  it  may  be  admitted  that  the  best  style 
is  that  which  seems  an  unconscious  result  rather  than  a  conscious  aim, 
still  in  these  latter  days,  when  violent  rhetoric  does  duty  for  eloquence, 
and  vulgarity  usurps  the  name  of  nature,  we  should  be  grateful  for  a 
style  that  deliberately  aims  at  perfection  of  form,  that  seeks  to  produce 
its  effect  by  artistic  means,  and  that  sets  before  itself  an  ideal  of  grave 
and  chastened  beauty." — Pall  Mall  Gazette. 

"  The  distinctive  merit  and  characteristic  of  the  whole  book  will  be 
missed  if  the  reader  does  not  appreciate  what  the  author  has  evidently 
tried  to  do.  He  must  not  consider  himself  as  listening  to  a  tale-teller, 
but  as  watching  an  artist  gradually  adding  stroke  to  stroke,  and  produc- 
ing, not  so  much  a  successive  effect,  as  in  narration,  but  a  combined  and 
total  impression,  as  in  drawing.  ...  In  Mr.  Pater's  hands  it  is  prac- 
tised very  skilfully  indeed. " — Saturday  Review. 

"  His  style  is  always  beautiful  in  its  quietness ;  his  colours,  faint  as 
ever,  are  clearer  and  purer  than  of  old.  .  .  .  The  portrait  of  '  A  Prince 
of  Court  Painters '  is  painted,  and  most  exquisitely,  in  the  journal  of  a 
woman  of  his  native  town,  Valenciennes.  .  .  .  'Denys  l'Auxerrois'  is 
the  most  striking  of  these  pictures,  the  most  picturesque,  the  most 
characteristic,  the  most  adorned  with  touches  in  Mr.  Pater's  own  pecu- 
liar style.  .  .  .  Most  people  will  think  '  Sebastian '  less  interesting  than 
any  of  his  three  companions ;  still,  in  the  telling  of  his  story,  there  is 
power  of  a  very  remarkable  kind. " — Spectator. 


MACMILLAN  AND  CO.,  LONDON. 


MESSRS.   MACMILLAN  AND  CO.'S  PUBLICATIONS. 


&fje   €ij£rsleg   tuition 
CHARLES  KINGSLEY'S  NOVELS  AND  POEMS. 

In  Thirteen  Volumes.     Globe  %vo.     $s.  each. 

Westward  Ho  I   .         .2  Vols.  |  Yeast  .  1  Vol. 

Two  Years  Ago  .         .     2  Vols.  |  Alton  Locke         .         .  2  Vols. 

Hypatia        .  .2  Vols.  |  Hereward  the  Wake  2  Vols. 

Poems     ....     2  Vols. 


The  Poetical  and  Dramatic  Works  of  Samuel  Taylor  Coleridge. 
Founded  on  the  Author's  latest  Edition  of  1834,  with  many  Addi- 
tional pieces  now  first  included,  and  with  a  Collection  of  various 
Readings.     4  vols.     Fcap.  8vo.     31s.  6d. 

*#*  Also  an  Edition  on  Large  Paper.     ^2:12:6. 

Coleridge.  By  H.  D.  Traill.  Crown  8vo.  Paper  Covers,  is. 
Cloth,  is.  6d.  [English  Men  of  Letters  Series. 

The  Complete  Poetical  Works  of  William  Wordsworth.  Copy- 
right Edition.  With  an  Introduction  by  John  Morley,  and  Por- 
trait.    Crown  8vo.     7s.  6d. 

Wordsworth  :  Select  Poems.  Chosen  and  Edited,  with  Preface,  by 
Matthew  Arnold.     i8mo.     4s.  6d.        [Golden  Treasury  Series. 

*#*  Large  Paper  Edition.     8vo.     9s. 

Wordsworth.  By  F.  W.  H.  Myers.  Crown  8vo.  Sewed,  is. 
Cloth,  is.  6d.  [English  Men  of  Letters  Series. 

Sir  Thomas  Browne's  Religio  Medici ;  Letter  to  a  Friend,  &c, 
and  Christian  Morals.  Edited  by  W.  A.  Greenhill,  M.D. 
With  Portrait.     l8mo.     4s.  6d.  [Golden  Treasury  Series. 

THE  VICTORIA  SHAKESPEARE. 
The  Works  of  William  Shakespeare.     The  text  of  the  Globe  Edi- 
tion, with  a  new  Glossary  by  Mr.   Aldis  Wright.     In  3  Vols. 
Crown  8vo.      6s.  each.      Vol.  I.  Comedies.      Vol.  II.   Histories. 
Vol.  III.  Tragedies. 

The  St.  James's  Gazette  says  : — "  The  '  Victoria  Edition '  of  Shakespeare  has  the 
text  of  the  Cambridge  editors  ;  but  it  is  in  three  handy  octavo  volumes,  and  the  type 
is  sufficiently  large  and  clear  to  be  read  with  pleasure.  The  price,  too,  is  low.  Al- 
together this  is  a  good  '  Shakespeare '  to  have  on  the  shelves  of  one's  library,  and  it 
steers  a  happy  mean  between  the  rival  inconveniences  of  a  dozen  volumes,  and  a 
type  of  painful  minuteness." 

Shakespeare.  Edited  by  W.  G.  Clark  and  W.  A.  Wright.  With 
Glossary.     Globe  8vo.     3s.  6d.  [Globe  Edition. 

Shakespeare's  Songs  and  Sonnets.  Edited,  with  Notes,  by  Pro- 
fessor Francis  Turner  Palgrave.     i8mo.     4s.  6d. 

[Golden  Treasury  Series. 


MACMILLAN  AND  CO.,  LONDON. 


MESSRS.   MACMILLAN    AND    CO.'S   PUBLICATIONS. 


The  Intellectual  Life.    By  P.  G.  Hamerton.    Third  Edition.    Crown 

8vo.     I  os.  6d. 
Thoughts  about  Art.      By  the  Same.      New  Edition,   revised,  with 

Notes  and  Introduction.     Crown  8vo.     8s.  6d. 
Human  Intercourse.     By  the  Same.     Third  Thousand.     Crown  8vo. 

8s.  6d. 
French  and  English :  a  Comparison.  By  the  Same.  Crown  8vo.  ios.6d. 
The  Choice  of  Books ;   and  other  Literary  Pieces.     By  Frederic 

Harrison.     Fourth  Edition.     Globe  8vo.     6s. 

Also  an  Edition  on  Large  Paper.     8vo.     155. 

Essays,  chiefly  on  Poetry.     By  Aubrey  de  Vere.     2  Vols.     Globe 

8vo.     12s.     Vol.  I.  Criticisms  on  Certain  Poets.     Vol.  II.   Essays, 

Literary  and  Ethical. 
Essays,  chiefly  Literary  and  Ethical.    By  the  Same.    Globe  8vo.    6s. 
Essays  on  some  of  the  Modern  Guides  of   English  Thought  in 

Matters  of  Faith.     By  R.  H.  Hutton.     Globe  8vo.     6s. 
Essays.     2  Vols.     By  the  Same.     Globe  8vo.     6s.  each. 
Essays.     2  Vols.      I.    Classical.      II.    Modern.     By  F.  W.  Ff. 

Myers.     Crown  8vo.     4s.  6d.  each. 
The  Works  of  Arthur  Hugh  Clough.     In  2  Vols.    Crown  8vo.     7s.  6d. 

each.     I.  Poems.     New  and  Revised  Edition.     II.   Prose  Remains. 

With  a  Selection  from  his  Letters  and  a  Memoir.    Edited  by  his  Wife. 
The  Journal  Intime  of  Henri  Frederic  Amiel.     Translated,  with  an 

Introduction  and  Notes,  by  Mrs  Humphry  Ward.    Crown  8vo.    6s. 
Partial  Portraits.     By  Henry  James,  Author  of  "The  Europeans," 

"  French  Poets  and  Novelists,"  etc.     Crown  8vo.     6s. 

By  J.  P.  Mahaffy,  M.A.,  D.D.,  Fellow  and  Professor  of  Ancient 
History  in  Trinity  College,  Dublin,  and  Hon.  Fellow  of  Queen's 
College,  Oxford : — 

Social  Life  in  Greece :  from  Homer  to  Menander.  Fifth  Edition,  re- 
vised and  enlarged.     Crown  8vo.     9s. 

Greek  Life  and  Thought :  from  the  Age  of  Alexander  to  the  Roman 
Conquest.     Crown  8vo.     12s.  6d. 

Rambles  and  Studies  in  Greece.  With  Illustrations.  Third  Edition, 
revised  and  enlarged.     With  Map.     Crown  8vo.     ios.  6d. 

A  History  of  Classical  Greek  Literature.  In  2  Vols.  Crown  8vo. 
9s.  each.  Vol.  I.  The  Poets,  with  an  Appendix  on  Homer  by  Prof. 
Sayce.     Vol.  II.  The  Prose  Writers. 

The  Art  of  Conversation,  The  Principles  of.  Second  Edition,  re- 
vised.    Crown  8vo.     4s.  6d. 

Mythology  and  Monuments  of  Ancient  Athens  :  being  a  Translation 
of  a  portion  of  the  "Attica"  of  Pausanias  by  Margaret  de  G. 
Verrall,  with  Introductory  Essay  and  Archaeological  Commentary 
by  Jane  E.  Harrison,  Author  of  "  Myths  of  the  Odyssey,"  "  In- 
troductory Studies  in  Greek  Art,"  etc.  With  Illustrations  and  Plans. 
Crown  8vo.     16s. 

MACMILLAN  AND  CO.,  LONDON. 


Price  Is.  each  in  Paper  Covers,  or  in  Cloth  Binding,  Is.  6d. 

ENGLISH     MEN     OF     LETTERS. 

Edited  by  JOHN  MORLEY. 


"  This  admirable  series."- 
"  Enjoyable  and  excellent 

JOHNSON.     By  Leslie  Stephen. 
SCOTT.    By  R.  H.  Hutton. 
GIBBON.     By  J.  C.  Morison. 
SHELLEY.     By  J.  A.  Symonds. 
HUME.    By  T.  H.  Huxley,  F.R.S. 
GOLDSMITH.    By  William  Black. 
DEFOE.     By  W.  Minto. 
BURNS.    By  Principal  Shairp. 
SPENSER.     By  R.  W.  Church,  Dean 

of  St.  Paul's. 
THACKERAY.      By  Anthony  Trol- 

lope. 
BURKE.    By  John  Morley. 
MILTON.    By  Mark  Pattison. 
HAWTHORNE.    By  Henry  James. 
SOUTHEY.    By  Prof.  Dowden. 
BUNYAN.    By  J.  A.  Proude. 
CHAUCER.     By  A.  W.  Ward. 
COWPER.    By  Goldwin  Smith. 
POPE.    By  Leslie  Stephen. 
BYRON.    By  John  Nichol. 


-British  Quarterly  Review. 
little  books." — Academy. 

DRYDEN.    By  George  Saintsbury. 
LOCKE.    By  Thomas  Fowler. 
WORDSWORTH.   By  F.  W.  H.  Myers. 
LANDOR.    By  Sidney  Colvin. 
DE  QUINCEY.     By  David  Masson. 
CHARLES  LAMB.  By  Rev.  A.  Ainger. 
BENTLEY.     By  Prof.  R.  C.  Jebb. 
DICKENS.    By  A.  W.  Ward. 
GRAY.    By  Edmund  Gosse. 
SWIFT.    By  Leslie  Stephen. 
STERNE.    By  H.  D.  Traill. 
MACAU  LAY.    By  J.  C.  Morison. 
FIELDING.    By  Austin  Dobson. 
SHERIDAN.     By  Mrs.  Oliphant. 
ADDISON.     By  W.  J.  Courthope. 
BACON.     By  R.  W.  Church,  Dean  of 

St.  Paul's. 
SIR    PHILIP   SIDNEY.      By   J.    A. 

Symonds. 
COLERIDGE.    By  H.  D.  Traill. 
KEATS.    By  Sidney  Colvin. 


Now  Ready,  Vols.  I.-XII.,  with  Portraits.    Crown  Svo.    2s.  6d.  each. 

ENGLISH    MEN    OF   ACTION. 


GENERAL  GORDON.    By  Colonel  Sir 

William  Butler. 
HENRY  THE  FIFTH.     By  the  Rev. 

A.  J.  Church. 
LIVINGSTONE.        By    Mr.    Thomas 

LORD  LAWRENCE.    By  Sir  Richard 

Temple. 
WELLINGTON.        By    Mr.    George 

Hooper. 
DAMPIER.  By  Mr.  W.  Clark  Russell. 
MONK.    By  Mr.  Julian  Corbett. 

***  Other  Volumes  are  in 


STRAFFORD.     By  Mr.  H.  D.  Traill. 
WARREN    HASTINGS.     By  Sir  Al- 

FRED  LYALL. 

PETERBOROUGH.    By  Mr.  W.  Steb- 

bing. 
CAPTAIN   COOK.      By  Mr.  Walter 

Besant. 
SIR  HENRY  HAVELOCK.      By  Mr. 

Archibald  Forbes. 


SIR  CHARLES  NAPIER.    By  Colonel 
Sir  William  Butler.     [In  the  Press, 
the  press  and  in  preparation. 


Now  Publishing,  Crown  Svo,  price  2s.  6d.  each. 

TWELVE    ENGLISH    STATESMEN. 

The  Times  says: — "We  had  thought  that  the  cheap  issues  of  uniform  volumes 
on  all  manner  of  subjects  were  being  overdone,  but  the  '  Twelve  English  States- 
men,' published  by  Messrs.  Macmillan,  induce  us  to  reconsider  that  opinion. 
Without  making  invidious  comparisons,  we  may  say  that  nothing  better  of  the 
sort  has  yet  appeared,  if  we  may  judge  by  the  five  volumes  before  us.  The  names 
of  the  writers  speak  for  themselves." 
WILLIAM  THE  CONQUEROR.  By 
Edward  A.  Freeman,  D.C.L.,  LL.D. 
[Ready. 
HENRY  II.    By  Mrs.  J.  R.  Green. 

[Ready. 
EDWARD  I.    By  F.  York  Powell. 
HENRY  VII.    By  James  Gairdner. 

[Ready. 

CARDINAL  WOLSEY.     By  Professor 

M.  Creighton,  M.A.,  D.C.L.,  LL.D. 

[Ready. 


ELIZABETH.      By  E.  S.  Beesley. 
OLIVER  CROMWELL.    By  Frederic 
Harrison.  [Ready. 

WILLIAM  III.    By  H.  D.  Traill. 

[Ready. 
WALPOLE.  By  John  Morley.  [Ready. 
CHATHAM.    By  John  Morley. 
PITT.    By  John  Morley. 
PEEL.    By  J.  R.  Thursfield. 


MACMILLAN  AND  CO.,  LONDON. 


MESSRS.  MACMILLAN   AND  CO.'S   PUBLICATIONS. 


THE  COLLECTED  WORKS  OF  JOHN  MORLEY. 

A  ATew  Edition.     In  Ten  Volumes.     Globe  8vo.    js.  each. 

Rousseau  .  .  .2  Vols. 
On  Compromise  .  .  1  Vol. 
Miscellanies         .         .     3  Vols. 


Voltaire    .         .         .1  Vol 
Diderot  and  the  En- 
cyclopaedists .     2  Vols 


Burke 1  Vol. 

On  the   Study    of  Literature.      By  John    Morley.      Being  the 

Annual  Address  to  the  Students  of  the  London  Society  for  the  Extension  of 
University  Teaching.  Delivered  at  the  Mansion  House,  February  26,  1887. 
Crown  8vo.     is.  6d. 

Aphorisms.     By  Tohn  Morley.     Being  an  Address  delivered  before 
the  Edinburgh  Philosophical  Institution,  nth  November  1887.  Globe  8vo.  is.  6d. 
Walpole.     By  John  Morley.     Crown  8vo.     2s.  6d. 

\T-welve  English  Statesmen. 

The  COLLECTED  WORKS  OF  RALPH  WALDO  EMERSON. 

In  Six  Volumes.     Globe  8vo.    js.  each. 

1.  Miscellanies.  With  an  Introductory  Essay  by  John  Morley. 
2.  Essays.  3.  Poems.  4.  English  Traits  :  and  Representa- 
tive Men.  5.  Conduct  of  Life :  and  Society  and  Solitude. 
6.  Letters :  and  Social  Aims,  etc. 


The  Life  of  Ralph  Waldo  Emerson.     By  J.  L.  Cabot,  his  Literary 
Executor.     Two  Vols.     Crown  8vo.     18s. 


THE  DEAN  OF  ST.  PAUL'S. 

Collected  Edition  of  DEAN  CHURCH'S  MISCELLANEOUS  WRITINGS. 

In  Five  Volumes.     Globe  8vo.    js.  each. 

Vol.  I.  Miscellaneous  Essays.   Vol.  II.  Dante  ;  and  other  Essays. 

Vol.  III.  St.  Anselm.     Vol.  IV.  Spenser.     Vol.  V.  Bacon. 

THE  WORKS   OF  THOMAS  GRAY.       * 

Edited  by  Edmund  Gosse. 

In  Four  Volumes.     Globe  8vo.     20s. 

Vol.  I.   Poems,  Journals,  and  Essays.     Vol.  II.    Letters. 

Vol.  III.   Letters.     Vol.  IV.    Notes  on  Aristophanes  and  Plato. 


CHARLES    LAMB'S   COLLECTED   WORKS. 

Edited,  with  Introduction  and  Notes,  by  the 
Rev.  Alfred  Ainger,  M.A. 
In  Six  Volumes.     Globe  8^0.    5s.  each. 
I.  Essays  of  Elia.     II.  Plays,  Poems,  and  Miscellaneous  Essays. 
III.  Mrs.  Leicester's  School ;   The  Adventures  of  Ulysses  ; 
and  other  Essays.     IV.  Tales  from  Shakespeare.     V.  &  VI. 
Letters.     2  Vols.         

The  Life  of  Charles  Lamb.     By  the  Rev.  Alfred  Ainger,  M.A. 

Uniform  with  the  above.     Globe  8vo.     5s. 


MACMILLAN  AND  CO.,  LONDON. 


University  of  California  Library 
Los  Angeles 

This  book  is  DUE  on  the  last  date  stamped  beW.^ 


NOV  0 1  ?004 


9188 


YRl-.-,«iC5  2m 


ffts-/ 


